Under the new enforcement priorities, almost all undocumented immigrants are now priorities for arrest by ICE. Green card holders with previous criminal offenses that make them “removable” under the INA are now also a priority, no matter how old the offense is.
What Byrne failed to make abundantly clear was that he was referring solely to the city’s detainer law, and not to whether ICE itself could make an arrest and begin removal proceedings of an immigrant based on a low-level offense that was given to them by the NYPD. To his credit, later in the same interview, Byrne made that distinction, but that was after he had made the misleading comments. The NYPD’s spin machine was off-and-running.
“Larry Byrne sets the record straight: Turnstile jumping won’t get you deported, despite what advocates claim,” J. Peter Donald, the NYPD’s Assistant Commissioner for Communication & Public Information, wrote on Twitter.
When pressed by reporters as to what exactly he was referring to, Donald said he was speaking only about the city’s detainer law, and that advocates and media had been claiming that the NYPD was turning over immigrants directly to ICE for low-level offenses. Donald declined to specify which media outlets or advocates had been saying that, however. (Ironically, on Sunday, one of the NYPD’s unions demanded that police be allowed to assist ICE, perhaps helping to spread the idea among immigrant communities that police officers willingly coordinate with federal immigration enforcement).
To advocates, it appeared that the NYPD was purposefully obfuscating their role in order to save face and keep New York City in line with the “sanctuary city” image its mayor continues to project, even as his steadfast support of Broken Windows policing puts immigrants at risk of deportation for something as petty as jumping a turnstile.
On Saturday, the mayor himself picked up the NYPD spokesperson’s thread: “We became the safest big city in America in part because all of our neighbors feel they can trust the NYPD,” de Blasio’s account tweeted, along with a link and caption from an article where Byrne claimed that “nobody is getting deported for a minor offense.”
Over the past several weeks, the de Blasio administration has refused to acknowledge the extent of the threat that low-level arrests pose to the city’s immigrants, at times showing a lack of understanding of federal immigration laws in both emails and phone calls with the Village Voice. It has often confused the city’s detainer law, which protects immigrants in custody (unless they are arrested for one of 170 “serious” felonies) with what can happen on city streets after an arrest has been made by the NYPD.
And while it’s understandable that the mayor and NYPD would seek to reassure immigrant communities that the police pose no direct threat to their safety, as long as the NYPD is making arrests for low-level nonviolent offenses, it is putting immigrants in harm’s way. Until the NYPD stops doing that, saying “no one would be deported for jumping a turnstile,” remains not only demonstrably untrue, but dangerously misleading to the city’s immigrant community.
Article Appeared @http://www.villagevoice.com/news/yes-new-yorkers-can-be-deported-for-jumping-a-turnstile-9719151