By Jeff Gammage
The Philadelphia Inquirer
(The Philadelphia Inquirer) — About 75 immigration activists and supporters rallied outside City Hall on Tuesday afternoon to demand that Mayor Cherelle L. Parker forcefully speak up for Philadelphia’s status as a sanctuary city.
They planned to then march to the ICE office a few blocks away, where they intended to conduct a candlelight vigil for detained immigrants.
”Sanctuary for one is sanctuary for all!,” Juntos Executive Director Erika Guadalupe Núñez declared to the crowd. “This is the time for intentional action.”
People holding signs and flags met on the south side of City Hall, beside the statue of Octavius Catto and not far from the blinking lights of a holiday carousel.
“Mayor, if you support immigrants, then please stand up and say, ‘I am going to support the sanctuary city policy,” said Julio Rodriguez, political director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group. “This ambiguity is unacceptable.”
In September, he said, the mayor issued a proclamation for Welcoming Week, which celebrates the contributions of immigrants.”Depending on the month, she is pro-immigrant,” he said. “This is not one of those months.”
Parker has declined to forcefully reassert Philadelphia’s status, despite demands from immigrant groups that she speak out.
The mayor’s spokesperson Joe Grace told The Inquirer last week that the administration’s priority is to improve public safety and quality of life, not to respond to the president-elect’s rhetoric. The 2016 executive order that codified the city’s sanctuary status — it directed workers to respond to judicial warrants, not to ICE-issued detainers to hold immigrants — remains in place, he said.
“The Parker administration remains laser-focused on the agenda that Philadelphians elected her to implement: making Philadelphia a safer, cleaner, greener city, with access to economic opportunity for all,” Grace said. Grace said Tuesday the administration’s comment remains the same.
“This is the time for the mayor to speak up for the people,” said Jay Lee, the advocacy and communications manager at the Worri Center, the Asian-American justice group, on Tuesday. “The city is our home. We need to protect our rights, defend our neighbors.”
The rally was to be followed by a march to the ICE office at 10th and Cherry Streets, where sponsors including Juntos, the Worri Center, New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, VietLead and the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition were to hold a candlelight vigil.
Parker’s cautiousness around sanctuary has leaders in local immigrant communities concerned that people could be made vulnerable at a moment when the incoming Trump administration is promising to deport millions of undocumented migrants, among them some 47,000 in Philadelphia.
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The rally comes as Parker nears the end of her first year in office and as President-elect Donald Trump, to be inaugurated next month, pledges aggressive action on sanctuary cities across the United States.
Councilmember Rue Landau, who has called for “Trump Preparedness” hearings, reaffirmed her commitment to Philadelphia being a sanctuary city, saying that would not be reversed on her watch. Immigrants are family members, friends and co-workers, and they deserve to have their rights protected, she said Tuesday.
Sanctuary cities — jurisdictions that deliberately limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement — have become an increasingly volatile political issue and potential vulnerability for Democrats, who after a bruising national electoral loss are trying to regain voters who think the party is weak on immigration.
Parker said during her campaign last year that she supports Philadelphia being a sanctuary city, but neither she nor other candidates made it a significant issue.
Some see the mayor’s approach as politically astute, given the unpredictability of Trump administration policy.
Larry Ceisler, a public affairs executive based in Philadelphia, earlier told The Inquirer that Parker’s language was “responsibly cautious” in the wake of Trump’s election.
“She’s walking a really fine line here,” Ceisler said. “And you’re dealing with a potential of an administration in Washington like no one’s ever dealt with before — one that speaks openly about retribution and vindictiveness.”
Trump has pledged to undertake the largest mass-deportation program in American history, and his advisers are discussing how to strip federal funding from Democratic-run cities if their leaders refuse to help him. Trump has said he would ask Congress to pass a law outlawing sanctuary cities, and demand that the “full weight of the federal government” fall upon jurisdictions that decline to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Sanctuary cities generally refuse to deputize their local police officers as acting ICE agents, and some places, including the state of New Jersey, have sought to ban the creation of immigrant-detention centers.
The message from Parker has been much less absolute, contrasting not only with some Democratic leaders in other cities but with her predecessor, former Mayor Jim Kenney. He made support for the city’s immigrants a cornerstone of his political identity, and battled against the first Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The Kenney administration fought and won a major federal lawsuit in 2018 over Trump’s effort to make local police enforce federal immigration laws, kicked ICE out of a database it believed the agency was using to find undocumented people, and barred city employees from asking residents about their immigration status.
Philadelphia and other sanctuary jurisdictions typically do not honor ICE-issued detainers to keep undocumented people in custody beyond their court-determined release date, responding only to judicial warrants to do so. Leaders in sanctuary cities say they could be sued if they obeyed administrative ICE detainers and held people beyond the release dates set by judges.
Other places and states say law-enforcement officers, federal and local, must work together to deport people who are in the country illegally.
States including Florida, Arizona and Texas passed laws banning sanctuary cities, and last month, Texas offered land to the Trump administration to build detention facilities near the border. Jurisdictions in nearly two dozen states help ICE by providing information and manpower under a program called “287g,” named for a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
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