David Narkewicz
Mayor of Northampton
“I think it's great that people feel comfortable using City Hall
as a powerful symbol for the community to rally around.”
On the day we arrived to interview Mayor David Narkewicz, a rally of marchers was approaching the steps just as we entered City Hall. We asked Mayor Narkewicz to tell us about the event outside his office window.
“There's a march and rally that's happening… focusing on immigrant workers, people that are members of our immigrant communities, who work in local businesses. And [the march is] out of concern for some of the policy decisions by the current [national] administration. I think it's primarily just trying to support all community members’ right to work and live here peacefully and also, sort of secondarily, supporting a minimum wage for all of our workers.”
“City Hall has long been what we call a ‘free speech zone’ and it's been a place where people come to do all kinds of protests or celebrations.”
“I think today is looking beyond Northampton and really looking at national leaders, so I fully support it. And I think it's great that people feel comfortable using City Hall as a powerful symbol for the community to rally around.”
Northampton has made national headlines for its designation as a sanctuary city. What does it actually mean for Northampton to be a sanctuary city?
“Well, I issued the executive order* in 2014, and while it explicitly did not say ‘Northampton is a Sanctuary City,’ it basically adopted a set of policies regarding how Northampton, specifically how our Police Department, will interact both with federal immigrations officials as well as how the Police Department will interact with residents in our community, but specifically members of immigrant populations.”
“Specifically, what the executive order said was that the city of Northampton will not honor administrative detainer requests from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] which are, they're not judicial orders; they are nothing issued by a court. It's basically an ICE official calling Northampton police and saying, ‘We think, we see that you have Mr. Jones. We'd like you to hold Mr. Jones for us.’ And we believe that, not only does that violate the Fourth Amendment, but it also violates the Tenth Amendment, which is that the Federal Government cannot require local police... can't deputize local police departments to do their work. The executive order also includes information about traffic stops and the kinds of information we are going to ask for. If someone has a broken tail light, we are not going to ask them for their papers or any of that kind of stuff.”
“The primary impetus was that we want people to feel safe in our community. If you're a criminal in our community, no matter what your status is, we're going to arrest you. But if you are a law-abiding member of the community, we want you to feel safe and we want you to feel like you can come forward to the police and report crimes or report violence that's been committed against you. So because we've taken that position, we’ve been called a so-called ‘sanctuary city’.
Sanctuary City
“Often times it gets misrepresented, including by our president, to mean that… we are providing, kind of, a shelter for people that are lawless, or that are breaking the law, or that are, you know, committing crimes; and that's really not the case. If ICE came to our city and wanted to carry out their work, we would not help them, but we would not interfere with them. But, what it does mean is that we don't believe that it is our role as a local government to do the work of the Federal Government. And personally, what it means for me is, I think that the Federal Government should work on fixing our broken immigration system, not doing all this punitive, you know, spending all the money that they're trying to spend on these raids and talking about building a wall. They should really focus on, ‘How do we fix the immigration system so that people who want to be productive citizens can gain citizenship and can be here under a legal status.’”
How will Northampton respond to the current president’s statement that federal dollars will be withheld from sanctuary cities?
“[President Trump] said that as a candidate and he said that as president and I've researched the issue and I don't believe he has the authority to do that, even if he wants to. And actually, there have been some recent determinations by courts to that effect... There's the Tenth Amendment issue which is that the Federal Government can't compel local states or their subdivisions, which would be local government, to carry out the work of the Federal Government. And there are Supreme Court cases about that.”
“The late Justice Scalia, wrote one of the leading decisions on this issue, which basically said that, ‘You can't deputize local law enforcement.’ So how could they condition funding on us being deputized to do their work? And that's why, when I talked about those administrative detainer requests, they are actually voluntary. It even says on the form ‘voluntary,’ because they know they can't enforce it lawfully. And in terms of other federal grants, you know, we receive millions of dollars from the Federal Government, and it's for specific things. For education, we get them for education under Title I and Title II. And yes, it's reasonable for the Federal Government to say, ‘Okay if you get a Title I Grant, then you have to submit things to us showing how you are improving reading or show us how you're working on training for your teachers.’ But requiring us to do something related to immigration, which has nothing to do with education, that has been found by, not only by the agencies, but by courts that really, they don't have the ability to do that. So, I'm not worried about it. I think it's unfortunate, again, that the president chooses to use fear tactics and to try to somehow scare us. Northhampton was in a big report that they just put out that ICE issued which was listing all these, you know ‘bad’ so-called ‘sanctuary cities’. And so there's a lot of targeting; there's a lot of scapegoating which, again, is unfortunate and I don't think really gets to the heart of the issue which is, ‘How do we fix our immigration system?’”
Comments on ICE
The thing to understand is that, violating the Nation's immigration laws is actually a civil [offense]. It's not a criminal offense; it's actually a civil offense. And so when ICE is carrying out a raid, or carrying out one these activities, the best analogy I can make is that if you cheat on your taxes, that's a civil offense. And the IRS, you know, has the ability to go in and come to your business or come to your house. And they have a warrant sometimes to be able to take your books or your computers or whatever else and seize them. Local law enforcement doesn’t get involved in that; nor does the City Tax Collector get involved in that. So it's sort of the same principle, that, why would local police get involved with ICE carrying out federal [work]? I don't have the ability, or our police department doesn't have the ability, to arrest somebody for being here illegally… It's not a criminal act, it's more of a civil infraction.”
On illegal immigration
“These are issues that the Congress has been looking at for the better part of ten years, but there has never been any kind of agreement between Republicans and Democrats. They all know the problem is there. They all know the system needs to be addressed. And so I think for me, I think that any long-term solution has to include some kind of an acknowledgement that, yes, there are these people who are here illegally. But if they're law-abiding, they're paying taxes, they have children here, they have children in our schools, we should figure out a way that they can become legal [citizens], that they can find, sort of a pathway to being legal [citizens]. And then, we should really reform our immigration system and figure out a way that we can prevent, in the future, people from finding themselves in this status.”
“People have come to the United States for centuries. I mean, my grandparents came to the United States from Poland to escape Russian authoritarianism; and my mom's parents came here from Ireland to escape famine and to escape poverty. So for centuries, I mean, we're a country of immigrants. So the idea that somehow immigrants are going to not want to come here anymore, it's sort of absurd. And so, I think we just have to work on adopting our policies to the modern realities of the world. And that's really what I think we need to do, not spend all of our time about, you know, ‘We're going to build a wall, we're going to deport 20 million people, and we're going to take away funding from cities and towns.’”
“But, at the end of the day the president hasn't been very successful in carrying out any of that, because in many cases the courts have found that it's an overreach and that it's unconstitutional.”
*Please see our other page, "Supporting Documents" for a copy of the 2014 Executive Order.