By Khalida Sarwari
Several San Jose community groups met privately with Department of Homeland Security agents on Tuesday afternoon to voice their concerns about the Police Department’s recent enlisting of two federal immigrations agency investigators.
The two-hour meeting with Police Chief Chris Moore and federal officials included a 10-minute presentation on the goals of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Community Shield” program, as part of which Moore enlisted the help of two investigators from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month.
Several immigrant and civil rights groups have been vocal about their opposition to the program, maintaining that the program increases the community’s distrust of law enforcement, cultivates fear and undermines immigrants’ civil liberties.
“The very goal of the program is to help public safety, but that’s exactly what it’s going to hurt,” said Zelica Rodriguez, a policy advocacy program director for the group Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network, or SIREN.
“I don’t think they really understood that (on Tuesday),” she said.
Moore has said the agents are not targeting immigrants, but are helping the department target escalating gang violence and that he would remove them if they overstepped their boundaries.
But group leaders say there is a better way: dispose of the agents and work directly with the community.
“He’s really focusing on that, making sure kids aren’t falling into gangs or being killed,” Rodriguez said. “But having trust in the community is also a way of preventing that.”
The main concern for the immigrant community is that the department’s collaboration with the two ICE agents will increase the chances of racial profiling and deportations. They claim that there have been cases across the country where agents have been authorized to question undocumented immigrants despite their criminal history or affiliation with gangs.
The two agents were not at the meeting and their identities are being kept secret to protect them from attacks. Their supervisor, Clark Settles, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security, fielded questions and concerns at the meeting.
A second Department of Homeland Security supervisor and a lieutenant from the Police Department’s gang unit were also present.
Rodriguez said she and others felt unsatisfied by the answers given to the questions they posed, such as those regarding accountability, the exact nature of the collaboration between ICE and the Police Department, and whether there is any evidence to prove that the collaboration will be effective.
“We learned more about what the partnership would look like, but I think the goal was still
unclear,” she said. “I felt like I got a confirmation there’s no proof this partnership is effective, more confirmation that accountability is really going to be an issue.”
She said they asked Moore what his strategy was to reach out and address the growing distrust in the immigrant community, but that question went unanswered.
Police Officer Jose Garcia, a spokesman for the department, acknowledged some groups were left unsatisfied at the end of the meeting and said the two sides agreed to meet again in September to continue the dialogue.
“We’re hoping to continue building trust with the community,” Garcia said. “We’re going to prove to the community that we are going to hold onto our word through actually showing them we’re out there and taking care of business and not enforcing immigration laws.”
The groups that participated in the meeting included SIREN, Sacred Heart Community Service, Silicon Valley DeBug, and Justice for Palestinians.