Arlington Heights says no to immigration agents using public spaces
Arlington Heights village board members have voted unanimously to ban immigration enforcement officials from using municipal property, though some trustees call the measure unenforceable.
The 8-0 vote late Monday came at the end of a debate lasting almost two hours in front of a packed village boardroom of residents opposed to the presence of federal agents in town in recent months.
“What our neighbors and residents have experienced, it is not safety. It is fear,” said Trustee Carina Santa Maria, who proposed the ordinance. “If we see this happening and choose not to act, then what is our role? We are elected to protect our neighbors — all of them — to create conditions for safety and stability, to take a stand when something is wrong.”
“It is not enough to say this isn’t our jurisdiction,” she added. “If it’s not ours, then whose is it?”
The ordinance, pending a final vote Dec. 1, would prohibit immigration agents from using any village-owned property, facilities or resources for the purpose of conducting civil enforcement operations. That would include areas already closed off to the public at large, such as a parking lot behind the police station.
But it also would encompass municipal parking areas that have spaces normally open to the public, such as the top floor of the Vail Avenue garage and the lot across the street from village hall.
Though he and other trustees eventually came to support the ordinance, Trustee Colin Gilbert questioned its enforceability and the expense of potentially having to fight such a measure in federal court.
“I don’t want anybody to be lulled into some sort of false sense of security that everything is OK, because we cannot keep these agents out of Arlington Heights,” Gilbert said. “What we can try to do is not allow them to use a small pocket of property. We can’t even do that. We can tell them we’d rather they didn’t. But in terms of enforceability, there’s just not much we can do.”
Trustee Jim Bertucci called the ordinance “window dressing.”
Nearly two dozen residents who later came up to the boardroom podium disagreed.
“Sometimes, it’s the principle of the thing, and not the enforceability of the thing,” said Robert Buehler, whose Ring doorbell camera footage of an Oct. 30 immigration arrest went viral.
The video captured federal agents pushing to the ground a mail carrier who tried to intervene in the arrest of a landscaper.
“I’m angry and saddened that my property played a role in this politically-motivated targeting of the Chicago area and the racial profiling of landscapers and others randomly working in our neighborhoods,” Buehler said.
The Rev. Corey Brost, executive director of the Viator House of Hospitality, which houses young men seeking asylum, said one of his residents is now in federal custody at a jail in Michigan. The 20-year-old Venezuelan man, who has an active asylum case and a work permit, was arrested by federal officers while repairing a sign at an East Dundee gas station, Brost said.
“We need to be on the right side of history,” Brost said of his support for the village ordinance. “This is a time of moral reckoning. And as for enforceability, Rosa Parks didn’t have the law on her side either.”