Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait and dozens of their counterparts from around the country joined forces Tuesday to call on Congress and President Donald Trump to fix a “broken” immigration system and pass a comprehensive overhaul of how people are granted entry into the United States.
The concerted effort by mayors to call for immigration reform and conduct a “day of action” in support of undocumented immigrants came one day after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials took their own action in targeting “noncooperative” cities.
The agency released its inaugural weekly report on cities or agencies that have rejected federal immigration detainer requests to hold people in local jails past their release dates. The report, which mentioned detainers that appeared to have been issued and rejected at Los Angeles and Anaheim jails, was prompted by an executive order signed by Trump in January.
During a teleconference Tuesday to discuss the mayors’ “day of action,” Garcetti compared the ICE report with an attempt to pin a “scarlet letter” on cities and law enforcement agencies and said it was “destructive” to collaborative relationships between local and federal governments.
• RELATED STORY: ICE puts LA jails on ‘non-cooperative’ list for refusing to hold immigrants
Tom Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said Tuesday that the group has “serious concerns” about ICE’s report, including questions about the assertion that the cities listed are “in noncompliance” when they do not honor federal detainer requests, which are often seen as voluntary by local law enforcement agencies.
Several mayors highlighted their individual cities’ efforts to help immigrants and to press for federal immigration reform during the teleconference, which was on the Cities’ Day of Immigration Action organized by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Garcetti, chairman of the group’s Latino Alliance.
Anaheim’s Tait, a Republican, said he and Democratic mayors such as Jorge Elorza of Providence, Rhode Island, are making a bipartisan push for the federal government to fix the nation’s immigration system.
“(Mayors) are closest to the issue,” said Tait, who co-chairs an immigration reform task force with Elorza in the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
As cities work to “keep people safe, and we protect their rights,” Tait said, “we have a broken system we have to work around.”
• RELATED STORY: Mayor Garcetti bars LA police, civil servants from acting as immigration enforcers
Tait said the task force is preparing a letter signed by mayors from around the country to demand comprehensive immigration reform, and he has also written an op-ed on the issue for The Orange County Register.
In the article, Tait said he has personally seen how undocumented immigrants “live in the shadows, scared to call police to report a crime or fearful to engage in their community.”
Meanwhile, Garcetti said the federal government must move forward on immigration reform that includes a “pathway to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million who people in the country illegally.
“Do what President Reagan and a bipartisan coalition in Congress did in the 1980s,” he said. “It’s long overdue.”
Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia, who emigrated from Peru at age 5, said his family benefited from President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program that allowed undocumented a path toward citizenship, and he wanted to share that “immigrants also grow up to become mayors.”
“People don’t realize that the immigration process and the path to citizenship — it is not easy,” he said. “It took us probably 10 years of going to offices, getting advice, waiting in lines, working with caseworkers to ensure that we were doing the process correctly.” Garcia said he was 21 years old and “coming out of college” when he and his family became U.S. citizens.
“The day I became a citizen was the best day of my life, and it instilled a value of loving your country, working hard and giving back,” Garcia said. “To the president and the members of Congress, all those young people out there, all those families that are out there, they want to be able to have the opportunity that so many other immigrants like myself and my family had.“
The cities “day of action” kicked off in Los Angeles at 6 a.m. with an on-air, phone-bank event at Univision Studios featuring legal experts giving advice on immigration matters.
Garcetti said he also visited the offices of immigrant advocacy group Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or CHIRLA, and spoke to immigrants known as DREAMers, who were brought to the United States illegally when they were babies or very young.
