By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists
Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.
CONCORD—Governor Kelly Ayotte’s announcement Thursday that the state police and other agencies would add enforcement of immigration law to their responsibilities drew quick condemnation from New Hampshire’s immigrants’ rights movement.
At issue is a program called 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationalities Act, under which local, county, and state police can be trained and authorized to enforce federal immigration law.
Stating that the State Police, Belknap County Sheriff’s Department, and the Gorham Police would sign 287(g) agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the governor said, “It is critical for state and local law enforcement to cooperate with federal authorities and protect our citizens. Criminals who are in our country illegally and pose a danger should be apprehended and removed. I support and encourage New Hampshire law enforcement agencies to cooperate with ICE to enforce our laws and keep our communities safe.”
For pro-immigrant advocates, Ayotte’s equation of unauthorized immigration with criminality is a far cry from her pledge to be “a governor for all of New Hampshire.”
“Participating in the 287(g) program shifts law enforcement interactions away from community policing principles,” commented Christine Wellington of the NH Immigrant Rights Network. “It feeds into spurious stereotypes that depict noncitizens as dangerous and criminal. It will fundamentally change the dynamics of police interactions with people within immigrant communities, including those who are lawfully present and including U.S. citizens. People will be afraid to come forward to report crimes and interact with police in community settings. Police departments that are not engaging in 287(g) enforcement will also suffer the negative consequences of this program as overall fear of police interactions rise.”
The program is also at odds with the State Police’s 5-year-old “Fair and Impartial Policing Policy,” which states that police can arrest suspects only for suspected criminal activity. Since unauthorized presence in the United States is a civil violation, not a criminal one, the policy seems to say State Police need to keep their distance from determining who is and who isn’t lawfully present.
“As the policy currently states,” said Wellington, whose background includes policing and immigration law, the State Police “routinely interacts with federal law enforcement, including federal officers engaged in immigration enforcement activities. There is absolutely no need for state and local law enforcement to expend our resources on civil immigration enforcement. There are a multitude of reasons to refrain from participation in this program.”
Eva Castillo, an immigrant from Venezuela, heads the NH Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and has spent years trying to improve relations between police and immigrant communities. From her vantage point, 287(g) is a backwards approach and “brings nothing good to our state.” By turning local and state police into immigration agents, the 287(g) agreements “have the potential to increase the incidents of racial profiling and civil rights violations,” she said.
“Our police departments already collaborate with ICE when necessary” she added. “They do not need to take on additional, uncompensated tasks, when they are already shorthanded to perform their own duties.”
Grace Kindeke, who immigrated to New Hampshire from the Democratic Republic of Congo as a child and now serves as Program Coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee, took her concerns to a busy corner in downtown Concord on Friday afternoon. There, she displayed a sign with a phone number to call if people spot ICE agents in their community. The point, she said, is “to call attention to the fact that our communities are being raided. Our community members are being kidnapped off the street.”
With the likely addition of state and local police to the ranks of immigration law enforcement, “we’re really losing that needed leadership at the top that says that all of us in New Hampshire are welcome. All of us are safe. All of us can trust in our police departments,” Kindeke said. “But it is clear by those decisions that that is no longer true.”
ICE agents are already wrecking families, said Glen Ring, a member of Concord’s Kent Street Coalition who was on the corner with Kindeke with a sign that said, “Love Your Neighbor.” In one recent situation, masked agents in an unmarked van arrested workers at a local restaurant, she said, noting that one of the workers had documentation.
The 287(g) agreements will just make it worse, she said. “It’s already a tense relationship between a lot of police departments and their local immigrant communities, and if suddenly they’re viewed as just part of ICE, it’s going to be very difficult.”
Holding half of a “Stronger Together” sign, Debbie Opramolla said immigrants should be welcomed in New Hampshire for the ideas and innovations they bring. “The only thing they’re asking for is to belong to a place where they can be free and have an opportunity to work and to provide for their families. This is a huge country, and our workforce is getting older. We need them, you know.” Marginalizing them because of the color of their skin or the way they speak doesn’t present a positive view of life in the United States, she said.
Like others, Opramolla said the 287(g) program is a waste of resources. “How about protecting our children from guns in school?” she asked. “Policing is for everyone, not just for a certain set of people.” The governor should “figure out a way to protect all the people, not just some of the people,” Opramolla said. “And as a black woman, why do I have to be profiled just to check to see if I’m American?”
The ACLU of New Hampshire has already sent Right-to-Know requests to the State Police, Belknap County, and the town of Gorham, seeking “all records, from January 1, 2025 to present, concerning (1) all internal and external communications (including with any federal employees) with respect to the 287(g) program and (2) any applications to participate in the 287(g) program.”