Andrew, learn from Bill
Gov. Cuomo is no doubt genuine in his aim to aid immigrants facing deportation in President Trump’s America. All the more reason to take exceeding care not to elevate himself above good sense in promoting a new program paying for their legal representation.
As advertised by a new Cuomo-linked fundraising group called New Yorkers United Together, Cuomo’s Liberty Defense Project “offers legal aid to immigrants in New York facing prosecution from the federal government.”
An internet ad from the group stars, who else, the governor, radiating tolerance betwixt a rainbow of New Yorkers professing mutual acceptance regardless of religion, origin, gender or hue.
Cuomo is passing the plate for private funds to complement $10 million in the state budget to aid groups that provide lawyers to help immigrants advance toward citizenship and, on defense, protect against deportation.
Bravo, but — among those groups’ clients are convicted serious felons, on a fast track to deportation that no publicly funded attorney can, or should, brake.
Mayor de Blasio gets it. In offering to boost taxpayer funds for a similar city-backed immigrant legal aid program, he is standing up to missingthe-plot City Council members to properly insist that a serious felony record — convictions, not arrests — will render immigrants facing deportation ineligible for a city-funded lawyer.
In criminal court, everyone unable to afford a defense attorney is constitutionally entitled to a lawyer on the taxpayer’s dime. Not in immigration proceedings — which is why the public must prioritize its limited resources. That means not paying, with one hand, to defend immigrants who are convicted rapists, murderers and the like, even as the other hand seeks to ship them out of the country.
Cuomo inexcusably declines so far to rule out state-funding lawyers for violent felons serving time in New York prisons who face deportation.
Which gets to one more set of touchy questions: Who’s giving to this fund? In what sums? And do they have business before the state?
Cuomo already rode the “Mario Cuomo Campaign for Economic Justice” RV to a $15 minimum wage on fuel of more than $1.7 million mostly raised from health care union SEIU1199.
He raised $17 million from business leaders via a nonprofit called the Committee to Save New York, with TV commercials that eerily echoed his official message.
Cuomo owes New York one pledge to deny state funds to literally indefensible felons, and a second to provide full and timely disclosure of the sources of every penny raised.