Adelante and a coalition of community partners are leading the charge to end Birmingham’s participation in federal immigration enforcement!
On January 31, 2017, the Birmingham City Council passed a resolution declaring its commitment to making Birmingham a sanctuary city. We called on the Council and all of our local elected leaders to make good on that promise by implementing strong, concrete, and lawful protections for the city’s immigrant communities. Birmingham, a bastion of civil rights and progress, must equally respect the civil rights of all residents and resoundingly reject being used as an arm of the Trump Administration’s detention and deportation machinery.
On June 13, 2017 we packed the council chambers and officially presented the proposed Sanctuary City Ordinance to the City Council. On July 1, hundreds of residents marched through the streets for the March For Sanctuary (view the press release here and news coverage of the march here).
After waiting almost a year for action from the City Council, a group of immigrant residents met with Mayor Randall Woodfin in April 2018 to ask him to take immediate action to protect Birmingham’s Latino and Muslim communities threatened by President Trump’s harsh policies. We shared a draft mayoral order, “Fostering Trust and Promoting Public Safety and Civil Rights For All City Residents,” that would ensure that city resources are not spent on doing ICE’s job for them, and asked the mayor to sign it immediately (a summary of the proposed Trust Order is available below).
On July 19, 2018, a coalition of civil rights organizations sent a letter, accompanied by a legal analysis from a University of Alabama constitutional law professor, to the Mayor demanding immediate action on the proposed Trust Order. On July 31, 2018, we mobilized to City Hall to call on the mayor to sign the Trust Order. We are still waiting for the city to take action to protect our communities.
View a summary of the proposed Trust Order here.
Vea un resumen de la propuesta Orden de Confianza aquí.
Birmingham Trust Campaign Members include:
Adelante Alabama Worker Center
Alabama Coalition for Immigration Justice
ACLU of Alabama
AIDS Alabama
Black Lives Matter-Birmingham Chapter
Council on American-Islamic Relations of Alabama
Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust
Equality Alabama
Faith in Action Alabama
Greater Birmingham Ministries
Guadalupan Multicultural Services “La Casita”
Moral Movement Alabama
NAACP of Alabama
National Association of Hispanic Nurses – Greater Birmingham Chapter
National Lawyers Guild-Alabama Chapter
Showing Up for Racial Justice-Birmingham Chapter
Southerners on New Ground
Southern Poverty Law Center
Letter to Mayor Woodfin from the Trust Coalition:
The most recent letter delivered to Mayor Woodfin and City Attorney Nicole King can be viewed here.
Legal & Policy Analysis:
To read about the legality of the proposed Birmingham Trust Policy that we have asked Mayor Woodfin to sign, check out this detailed legal analysis from constitutional law professor Bryan Fair of the University of Alabama School of Law.
To learn more about what a “sanctuary city” is, and why smart sanctuary policies increase public safety and uphold, not violate, the law, check out Adelante’s Legal & Policy Briefing: Making Birmingham a Sanctuary City (March 6, 2017) (also available en español: Informe Jurídico y Político: Convertir a Birmingham en Ciudad Santuario)
Additional resources on the legal and public policy reasons for ending police-ICE collusion:
ACLU Fact Sheet, “Major Developments Relating to ‘Sanctuary’ Cities under the Trump Administration,” Last updated August 27, 2018
Immigrant Legal Resource Center, “Immigration Detainers Legal Update,” July 2018
National Immigrant Justice Center et al., Assumption of Risk: Legal Liabilities for Local Governments That Choose to Enforce Federal Immigration Law, March 2018
Center for Popular Democracy, Protecting Immigrant Communities: Municipal Policy to Confront Mass Deportation and Criminalization, March 2017
Tom K. Wong, The Effects of Sanctuary Policies on Crime and the Economy, Center for American Progress, January 26, 2017
Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Searching for Sanctuary: An Analysis of America’s Counties & Their Voluntary Assistance with Deportations, December 2016
American Immigration Council, “Understanding Trust Acts, Community Policing, and ‘Sanctuary Cities,'” October 10, 2015
Nik Theodore, Insecure Communities: Latino Perceptions of Police Involvement in Immigration Enforcement, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Urban Planning and Policy, May 2013
Letters to Congress from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities, Major County Sheriff’s Association, Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force and others opposing federal legislation to deny funding to “sanctuary” jurisdictions
Map of jurisdictions that limit or bar local law enforcement entanglement in immigration enforcement
Adelante joined the amicus briefs filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Santa Clara v. Trump and San Francisco v. Trump, the lawsuits challenging a provision of President Trump’s immigration executive order threatening to revoke federal funds from “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Multiple federal district and appellate courts have enjoined the enforcement of Trump’s executive order and related DOJ grant conditions threatening so-called sanctuary cities.
#BhamTRUST #Sanctuary4Bham #ICEOutOfBham #MigraFueraDeBham