With Norwood home to a burgeoning Bangladeshi and established Hispanic community, and the Trump administration’s promise for a major ICE raid of roughly 2,000 undocumented immigrants this Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio reaffirmed the city’s ongoing commitment to protecting immigrants by informing them of their rights, providing free legal services should they require them and reassuring immigrants that city agencies would not cooperate in any way with ICE officials.  

Speaking on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on July 12, de Blasio said, “If anyone is afraid or concerned, you know, they can, whether their kids go to a school, or the police precinct, Health and Hospitals, they can go any place where they need assistance and they will, of course, be treated with absolute respect and not asked their documentation status, which is something we refuse to do.”

Asked by a caller, Ginny Fox, co-chair of the immigration rights committee with NYCD-16 Indivisible, a local grassroots Indivisible group in the Bronx on how he proposes to communicate this message of reassurance to immigrants, the mayor said that his Office of Immigrant Affairs had been out speaking with communities for the last few weeks because they had a false alarm a few weeks back and assumed a raid was coming. 

He said that forewarning about the potential raids had been spread by his office through trusted community leaders and institutions and houses of worship, reminding people of their rights and reminding people not to believe something is happening unless it’s confirmed by the city. He encouraged people to call 311 anytime to obtain clarity. 

“Anybody who has a question or concern or thinks they are seeing ICE activity can call 311 in 200 different languages,” he said. “We can provide service and support to tell people what’s really going on. This’ll be nonstop from now until Sunday, and beyond if needed. We have lawyers available for anyone who is targeted. We will get them a lawyer and the City will pay for it because the last thing we want to see, Brian, is families torn apart.”

The Mayor used the occasion to criticize what he called President Donald Trump’s “disgusting, cynical policy on immigration” which he believes is politically driven. 

“He’s simply trying to convince working class and middle class American citizens that immigrants are the cause of all their economic woes and misery,” he said. “And I said this in the debate that the folks who cause the pain of American working people are the big corporations, the one percent, the folks who had real power, not the immigrant who works in the kitchen or works in the field making sub minimum wage. So one, this is Trump simply using this as a wedge issue-moment. It’s cynical as all hell. He’s not going to be able to remove any substantial number of people from this country. And if he did, it would wreck the American economy.”

The mayor conceded that the city cannot confirm if the announced raids are real or not. “Last time he had this grandiose pronouncement, he was going to remove everyone, all 11 million people, then he stopped,” he said referring to President Trump. “Now he says he’s doing it again. We don’t know what’s real, but we are ready.”

Meanwhile, Antonio Meloni from the Queens-based Immigration Advocacy Services, Inc. said while advice is circulating on social media regarding the impending raids–including remaining silent and recording confrontations with ICE if it came to that– immigrants can also refer to trusted websites like the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), based in L.A. or the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP), based in New York City, both of whom offer advice for immigrants on their rights. 

Meloni said his organization continues to receive calls for assistance but they haven’t noticed any particular spike in calls since Sunday’s proposed ICE raids were announced. In fact, he suggested that under the current Trump administration, which is inextricably linked with tough immigration policy, there is a tendency among immigrants to become complacent sometimes regarding the threat of ICE raids as the norm, rather than the exception anymore.

Meloni says that in his experience the number of refugees seeking assistance from his organization is actually quite low and most immigrants are people who have perhaps overstayed their time in the U.S. In terms of who’s calling his agency the most he said, “We get citywide [calls] in the greater metro area but we do get more from Queens and the Bronx because of our location right here in Astoria, right near the Triborough bridge.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.