Robert Miller, Staff Writer
NewsTimes.Com
September 20, 2010
DANBURY -- Nilton Coelho owns Banana Brazil, a luncheonette on Main Street in downtown Danbury. As the name suggests, he serves Brazilian food.
The problem is, there aren't as many Brazilians in the city as there used to be, which means there aren't as many orders for plantains and sausage.
"My business has gone down,'' Coelho said recently.
As a result, he's spending more money on advertising to bring more Hispanics and more whites through the door. The strategy has worked, Coelho said, and that's helped him make up for the decline in Brazilian business.
But there is also the impact of 287(g) -- the federal statute that has become the informal name of the Danbury Police Department's formal affiliation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
The memorandum of agreement between ICE and the city of Danbury was adopted in September 2009.
Fearing deportation, many undocumented immigrants in Danbury -- Brazilians, Hispanics and others -- have pulled up stakes the past few years and left the area, according to some local observers.
The U.S. recession has certainly played a role in stemming the number of immigrants coming to the United States. But ICE has also scattered them out of Danbury, cultural leaders claim.
"They have gone to Waterbury, to Bridgeport, to New York, to Westchester County,'' said Wilson Hernandez, the former president of the Ecuadorian Civic Center in Danbury. "Yes, the economy is a factor, but the other factor -- the biggest -- is the city's anti-immigration policies.''
The ICE partnership brought crowds of people to City Hall in 2008 to protest the city's proposed involvement with federal immigration enforcement officials. Despite those protests, the City Council -- with the support of Mayor Mark Boughton -- voted to join the program.
Two city police detectives -- Louis Ramos and Joseph LeRose -- have undergone training with ICE agents. At a council meeting in June, Police Chief Alan Baker said the program has resulted in "several arrests'' in the city.
Baker said last week that the ICE program simply formalized a working arrangement Danbury already had with ICE -- the same relationship it has with the State Police or the FBI.
Nothing has changed in the city, Baker insisted, and the dire warnings of the City Hall protesters have not come true.
"There haven't been any sweeps," he said. "We're not stopping people to check their immigration status. We don't do that and it hasn't happened.''
In large part, Baker said, that hasn't happened because the Danbury Police Department is opposed to such moves. At the same time, he said, it's also because the department can't afford to do it.
"We don't have the resources,'' Baker said.
Breno DaMata, editor of Communidade News, a local Brazilian weekly newspaper, offered a different take on the city's immigration climate.
"Everybody knows Danbury is not friendly to immigrants,'' DaMata said flatly.
A few blocks away from Banana Brazil, Cleates Xavier -- the owner of Eliza's Store on Main Street -- said he's seen the same loss of Brazilian clientele.
"The Brazilian population in the city has gone down by a lot -- at least a third,'' Xavier said.
Part of that decrease is because of the U.S. recession. Brazilians came to Danbury for years in part because there were good-paying jobs here. Now, those jobs are scarce and the Brazilian economy is heating up.
Simply put, people move to find work.
And yet, the anxiety of an ICE arrest -- the fear of deportation -- has not gone away.
The rhetoric on both sides has cooled, Hernandez said, but there is a still "a nervousness" in the city's immigrant population.
"There are still a lot of people who don't know what's going to happen,'' Hernandez said.
Danbury attorney Agostinho Ribeiro, who is of Brazilian heritage, echoed those remarks.
"The mood is different,'' Ribeiro said. "There seems to be an underlying anxiety. There's still a certain discomfort here."
Ingrid Alvarez-DeMarzo, the director of the Hispanic Center of Greater Danbury, called the issue "the elephant'' in the room of the city's policies.
"It's the conversation at the dinner table, at breakfast,'' she said. "We're still finding out what ICE means. There's a lot going on and we don't know. It's a big gray area."
But in some ways, it's not only 287(g) and the city's involvement with ICE that is having an effect on local immigrant populations.
This year, ICE began a program called Secure Communities, which it described on its website as "a comprehensive plan to identify and remove criminal aliens.''
All police departments in Fairfield County, including the Danbury police, are working cooperatively with ICE on the Secure Communities program.
Harold Ort, a spokesman for ICE, said last week that because these people are in the United States illegally, their arrest and deportation is a good thing.
"We're moving in a positive direction to remove criminals as well as illegal aliens,'' Ort said.
Whether it's the 287(g) program or the Secure Communities program, the impact has been felt in Greater Danbury and beyond.
"There has been an increase in people being picked up, a definite increase,'' said Kristan Exner, a Danbury attorney who works on immigration cases. "(Federal officials) are really focusing on criminal arrests and outstanding orders of deportation. It's not just in Danbury, it's in the entire Fairfield County area.''
Michael Boyle, an immigration lawyer with offices in Danbury and New Haven, concurred with Exner.
"I have people being arrested all the time,'' Boyle said. "No question.''
Both Boyle and Exner said they've had cases in which a person arrested for driving while intoxicated had the case turned over to ICE for deportation proceedings.
"A lot of the problems stem from people just not knowing the laws,'' Alvarez-DeMarzo said. "People need some street smarts.''
And, she said, there's not a lot of help in the city, or the state, to help people who are in Danbury illegally work toward legal residency.
"We do the best we can,'' Alvarez-DeMarzo said. "But we're in a city with very limited legalization counseling.''
DaMata said after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008, there was widespread hope that comprehensive reform on the nation's immigration policies would clarify what undocumented immigrants needed to do to earn legal status in the United States.
"It's not happening,'' DeMata said. "People are losing faith.''
And, he said, the combination of a sluggish economy and the fear of deportation is only accelerating the process.
"People are thinking, `It's time to leave,''' DeMata said.
Hernandez said that when those people leave, they take away a valuable human resource.
"These people are valuable human assets to the community,'' Hernandez said, adding that their loss will be felt economically and culturally.
"This has been politicians playing the immigration card,'' Hernandez said. "But nobody ever talks about what the cost to the city has been. I'm not running for office or anything. But I think we should get rid of that card forever."
http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Anxiety-remains-a-year-after-Danbury-signs-ICE-666528.php
