Leavenworth urged to support undocumented immigrants

LEAVENWORTH – A local activist group will ask the Leavenworth City Council Tuesday to take an official stand to support the city’s undocumented immigrant population by refusing to dedicate city resources to their arrest and deportation.

“We’re asking that the city acknowledge that undocumented workers are part of our community and their contributions are important to our economy and the civic life of our community,” says Carl Florea, the Leavenworth resident who’s heading the effort for “NCW United,” a group of about 200 people.

The group will also ask the city to decline to dedicate city resources to helping federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to locate and arrest otherwise law-abiding residents who are undocumented immigrants.

“We’re not asking to protect criminals,” Florea said. “ICE is going to function. We can’t stop what ICE is going to do. But there’s a lot of fear in the community right now. It behooves us as members of the same community who have benefited from their work to say ‘We’ve got your backs. We’re with you.’ Their only crime is being here.”

Immigrants, documented and undocumented, comprise the majority workforce in the region’s ag industry. They also hold large percentages of construction labor and service industry jobs.

The group will ask city councilmembers to designate Leavenworth a “welcoming community,” which they say has a meaning similar to “sanctuary community,” but with a meaning that better reflects the group’s sentiment.

They expect a big turnout at Tuesday’s city council meeting, which comes a week after a U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo rekindled fears of mass deportations.

The Trump Administration has declared that only repeat criminals would be the target of ICE operations, and that children who have received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status would be spared.

But the memo appears to expand the definition of criminal to include nearly anyone with any form of infraction, even ones for which they’ve yet to be found guilty.

“The current administration is going after the need for immigration reform backwards,” Florea said. “You don’t clean it up by disrupting the economics of local communities and the families of the local workforce that have been in place for, some of them, decades.”

Rather, he said, the administration should work to secure the border and find a way to acknowledge the contribution of undocumented workers by giving them a path to legal residency.

Florea says group members will present the city council with a proposal, which he expects will become subject to further discussion in the coming days and weeks.