MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Democratic mayor of the state’s largest city on Monday pledged to resist the mass deportation promises of Republican President-elect Donald Trump and said he will protect immigrant residents who are in the country illegally.
“We cannot stand idly as members of our community are bullied, targeted and scapegoated on the national stage,” Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza said at a City Hall news conference.
Elorza said he has talked with the mayors of Los Angeles and New York and is standing with them and dozens of other cities, including San Francisco and Chicago, in promising to protect immigrants from deportation if their only violation is being in the country illegally.
Providence, which has about 180,000 residents, has refused to hold people charged with civil infractions for federal immigration officials.
Elorza, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala, said he will continue the policy even if Trump fulfills a campaign promise to pull money from cities that don’t cooperate with federal deportation measures. Unlike other cities that have passed ordinances formally declaring themselves as sanctuaries, Providence officials said the policy Elorza wants to preserve is a longstanding mayoral directive preceding his tenure and passed through the chain of command.
Public Safety Commissioner Steven Pare said the city’s police officers run fingerprints only on the people they arrest. Those fingerprints are electronically submitted to a federal database, and “if there’s a deportation warrant we’ll know about it,” Pare said.
But if immigration agents are interested in pursuing someone, they have to go to the person’s court arraignment or find another way to detain him or her, Pare said. Local police act on a civil immigration warrant only if a crime is involved, he said.
Elorza first made his promise to protect immigrants at a crowded rally of anti-Trump activists on Saturday, but he said Monday he has been encouraged by more measured statements recently made by Trump and his presidential transition team.
“I feel encouraged by what I’ve heard from the president-elect and his transition team, that they’re not going to put the focus on otherwise law-abiding residents,” Elorza said.
Trump said in an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday that his administration’s immediate priority will be on deporting criminals and securing the U.S.-Mexico border, where he has promised to build a wall.
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers,” Trump said. “We have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million; we are getting them out of our country or we’re going to incarcerate.”
About 30 percent of Providence residents were born in another country, according to Census Bureau estimates. About 38 percent of city residents are Latino.
Elorza said he has been troubled by stories he’s heard in recent days about fears expressed by schoolchildren about how their families and classmates could be affected.
“They’re concerned they’re going to lose their friends,” he said.
He said he also plans to introduce policies protecting religious minorities, gays and lesbians and other marginalized people who fear the incoming Trump administration.
Estimates by the Pew Research Center found that in 2014 there were about 30,000 immigrants in Rhode Island illegally. The largest groups were from Guatemala, Cape Verde and the Dominican Republic.
Although some outside Rhode Island’s capital city have derided Elorza’s approach as too lenient, local immigrant advocates said they don’t think the mayor is doing enough.
Gaspar Espinoza, of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, said Elorza’s comments sounded too much like a “re-election speech.” Espinoza said he would rather see the mayor enact a long-debated proposal to ban racial profiling by police.
