50 signatures reached
To: Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago City Council
Chicago City Council Can #AbolishICE By Stopping All Collaboration with ICE Agents
Improve the City of Chicago's Welcoming City Ordinance to remove all communication and collaboration between the Chicago Police Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and stop sharing information gathered by Chicago Police, such as the city's gang database, with ICE and other agencies.
Why is this important?
Around the country communities and elected officials are calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that conducts immigration raids violating people's civil and human rights.
As we continue this fight at the federal level, there are clear policies that could be passed in our city to take away the hold that ICE has on immigrant communities and abolish it from our city.
The Welcoming City Ordinance, the ordinance that delineates how Chicago interacts with ICE, still allows for communication and collaboration in a set of broad cases - when people have been accused of a felony (regardless of whether they have been convicted), when someone has been convicted of any felony at any point in their life, and when someone has been added to Chicago's flawed gang database. These carveouts are not a matter of public safety, rather of politics.
In addition, the Chicago Gang Database, which contains the names of 128,000 adults who are mostly Black and some Latinx, is consistently shared with federal agencies, including ICE, leading to immigration raids in the homes of people whose names are on the list.
If Chicago elected officials are serious about the call to #AbolishICE, they must first commit to take action on local policies that address the city's relationship to ICE and policing of immigrant communities and communities of color.
As we continue this fight at the federal level, there are clear policies that could be passed in our city to take away the hold that ICE has on immigrant communities and abolish it from our city.
The Welcoming City Ordinance, the ordinance that delineates how Chicago interacts with ICE, still allows for communication and collaboration in a set of broad cases - when people have been accused of a felony (regardless of whether they have been convicted), when someone has been convicted of any felony at any point in their life, and when someone has been added to Chicago's flawed gang database. These carveouts are not a matter of public safety, rather of politics.
In addition, the Chicago Gang Database, which contains the names of 128,000 adults who are mostly Black and some Latinx, is consistently shared with federal agencies, including ICE, leading to immigration raids in the homes of people whose names are on the list.
If Chicago elected officials are serious about the call to #AbolishICE, they must first commit to take action on local policies that address the city's relationship to ICE and policing of immigrant communities and communities of color.