Webber joins other mayors in protesting border tactics.
The mayors of New Mexico’s three major cities on Wednesday jointly authored a letter that expressed outrage over the Trump administration’s “inhuman” treatment of immigrants and asylum-seekers and called for an end to the “senseless” practice of separating thousands of children from their parents.
President Donald Trump, under pressure from angry members of his own party, on Wednesday afternoon signed an executive order that marked a retreat from the family-separation tactic his lieutenants have both trumpeted and said did not exist.
Meanwhile, Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber headed to the Texas borderlands Wednesday night to protest alongside a bipartisan contingent of mayors from across the U.S. in what has become a flashpoint in Trump’s continued crackdown on immigration.
Under the order that Trump signed Wednesday, border agents will detain families together indefinitely. The New York Times reported that Trump also directed federal lawyers to seek an amendment to a 1997 decree that prohibits the government from keeping children in immigration detention for more than 20 days.
The move was not likely to quiet the increasingly strident protests of the Trump administration’s border policies, however. Marches in cities across the U.S., including at least two in New Mexico, are planned for later this month.
Indeed, the missive from Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima and Webber, addressed to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, was part of a wave of international backlash against the images and audio of toddlers being kept in cages by federal agents, a practice critics have called illegal, barbarous and reminiscent of fascist, totalitarian regimes.
“It seems that this administration’s policy is to be as heartless as possible as often as possible,” the mayors wrote. “For as long as that is the case, we will fight back: standing up for our immigrant-friendly cities, marching, speaking out and rallying against these policies at every opportunity.”
Webber, a Democrat, plans to take part in a U.S. Conference of Mayors news conference early Thursday in Tornillo, Texas, a small town near El Paso that is the site of a temporary shelter for immigrant children. Keller and Miyagishima also will attend.
The El Paso Times reported Tuesday the mayoral delegation would include Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles as well as Democratic and Republican mayors from cities in California, Florida, Indiana, Georgia, Michigan and more.
Udall and New Mexico’s junior U.S. senator, Martin Heinrich, also a Democrat, plan to travel to Tornillo on Friday, the pair announced in a news release. Udall this week called the Trump immigration policy “unconscionable.”