ACLU wants city to drop reasons towork with ICE
The American Civil Liberties Union urged Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council Monday to strengthen Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance to ensure that “all immigrants are protected, without exception.”
Currently, Chicago Police officers are permitted to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement if targeted individuals are in the city’s gang database; have pending felony prosecutions or prior felony convictions, or if they are the subject of an outstanding criminal warrant.
For months, immigrant activists, the Black Youth Project and Hispanic aldermen have demanded removal of all of those so- called “carve- outs.”
On Monday, the ACLU joined the chorus, arguing that the exemptions “have little relationship to the goal of public safety.”
Of the 41,000 outstanding arrest warrants in Cook County, more than half are at least 10 years old, the ACLU claimed. Many of those warrants stem from a “technical violation of probation or supervised release— not a new charge,” the ACLU said.
The ACLU further argued that the Chicago Police Department’s gang database is “notoriously inaccurate.” That’s because, as the Sun-Times has reported, the public “does not know the criteria for inclusion on the list and someone placed on the list has no notice, nor any opportunity to contest inclusion.”
In a letter to key committee chairmen, ACLU senior staff attorney Rebecca K. Glenberg argued that CPD “already has plenty of tools to arrest and detain individuals who pose a real threat to the public — whether or not they are immigrants.”
Emanuel’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Martinez, said Chicago would “continue to ... stand up for the values that have made us a beacon of hope for immigrants and refugees from around the world for generations.”
But her emailed statement was silent on whether the exemptions would be eliminated, as the ACLU has demanded.