New Haven Is A Model For Fighting Trump's Deportation Machine

The small city has developed a reputation for its robust, coalition-based response to the threats posed to its immigrant community by federal immigration officials.

By Melinda Tuhus, The Progressive

After Donald Trump was elected to a second presidential term in 2024, New Haven’s venerable immigrant rights organization, Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), began beefing up its support team of local citizens who accompany undocumented immigrants to court appointments while keeping watch in and around the courthouse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. For groups like ULA, court support is an urgently important practice: While previous administrations barred ICE from making arrests at “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, and courthouses, Trump issued an Executive Order eliminating that policy immediately after taking office.

But the threat posed to immigrants by the Trump Administration hit particularly close to home one day in March, when, as an ULA team waited in a coffee shop downtown for an ULA member who appeared to be running late for a court date, the group was dismayed to learn that he’d been apprehended by ICE and was on his way to an immigration detention center. He was subsequently deported.

Though New Haven is a small city of 135,000 people, the robust response to Trump’s mass deportation efforts by its government entities, nonprofits, grassroots groups, and immigrant communities has enhanced its reputation as a “welcoming city” that will fight for the safety of all residents, regardless of their immigration status. In addition to New Haven’s ban on police collaborating with ICE, an executive order passed by Elicker directs all city staff, not just police, to decline to cooperate with federal immigration officials on solely immigration-related matters. The resistance efforts have also extended to its largest suburb, Hamden, where the Legislative Council passed an ordinance in late April codifying Mayor Lauren Garrett’s executive order extending protections to its immigrant population.

But as in every city, the path to effectively protecting immigrants is uncertain. “I think it’s early for us to know how things are going—they change dramatically every day,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker tells The Progressive. “We’ve retrained all our staff on the Welcoming City Executive Order. We’re doing what we can within the law and within our powers.”