The situation I learned about today (Monday) appears, at best, an egregious violation of voter sovereignty. At worst, we in Hartford government are not following rule #1 of the advice in the pamphlet “On Tyranny”:

1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Below is a post I made to the local list-serv. It’s date-stamped with references to an upcoming board meeting, but that’s what web-logs are, right? A moment in time? The content will remain important regardless when you read it. Onward:

If you care about how federal immigration law is being enforced in Hartford against our neighbors, you would do well to attend Tuesday’s Selectboard meeting, from 6pm to roughly 9 at Town Hall. It’s promising to be a spicy one, as the board will likely find some time to discuss the Welcoming Hartford Ordinance and how it is being enforced here. Or not enforced, as the case may be.

Wait, you thought we had already secured a Welcoming Hartford? Well, so did I! Ever since I joined the elected board—for whom I am not speaking, by the way—I’ve been regaled with this ordinance as part of why “we’re among the most progressive communities in the country,” especially including policing. However, on Monday, I and the rest of the Selectboard learned that Hartford PD has so far refused to alter a state-standard boilerplate policing policy to allow for the Welcoming Hartford Ordinance (WHO) to fully take effect. How long has this been the case? I’m not sure! Perhaps since it passed four years ago!

For background: the WHO basically describes that local police are prohibited from working with ICE and other federal agents to target, for civil immigration cases, any undocumented neighbors we may have in Hartford. Voters approved the ordinance in 2020 in a wide-margin vote, 1842 to 1177 votes.
Monday, I heard about ICE agents asking for identification at our Greyhound bus stop in White River Junction. Your neighbors may not be protected like you thought they would be with the WHO.

It would appear, according to a September memo from the police chief that the Selectboard was forwarded today, that Hartford police policy still leaves open the door to collaborating with ICE. This is despite legal analysis from ACLU and others that appears to show a department would be fully lawful in following the ordinance, at both the state and federal levels. ACLU-VT seems to have found that the state specifically provided for towns, if they so choose, to enact laws like this. While I’m not an attorney myself, if this is true then any retaliation from the state law enforcement body (such as refusing to train our officers, a specter someone raised today) could be challenged on this basis.

I, for one, believe that not following the wishes of voters—and worse, not informing them of that decision—disqualifies Hartford PD from being described with the term “progressive.” In our search for the next Chief (the outgoing one is departing soon), we should ensure all candidates for the role will revise this state boilerplate to comport with the ordinance our voters fought for.

I’m also curious who else in town government knew about this internal decision, since the board only learned of it Monday. Did officers joke among themselves that “the WHO isn’t actually enforceable anyway,” and laugh all the way to the bank? For what it’s worth, I think it’s more accurate to say that police are defunding *us* than to say the converse. When the board was attempting to make ends meet in the budgeting process this winter, I said I wouldn’t vote for a budget that cuts $300,000 from what the roads department wanted while not cutting anything from what the PD wanted. I proposed that, if we have to cut that much from roads, then we should also cut $100,000 from PD: a sum described to me earlier that evening as being for an as-yet-unhired position this year. (That’s right—an expansion.) With our current board, I didn’t get a “second” for this proposal; no one else would call for a vote. Perhaps that’s because of the idea of a “progressive police department.” Perhaps it’s time to lay that fallacy to rest and to make the department into something the majority of us can stand behind. Starting with the WHO.

If you wish to voice that you don’t appreciate your vote being thwarted by a non-attorney staffer’s legal analysis, which itself is contested by the analysis of attorneys who serve as directors of state-wide legal organizations, then I wholeheartedly encourage you to attend Tuesday’s meeting and say something.

Last but not least: for anyone still wondering why it’s important to work to defend our neighbors in this way: the current U.S. president is apparently giving ICE the latitude to “deport” Native Americans who don’t speak English well. (Think about that for a minute, and how clearly it reveals ICE as a race-based endeavor.)

To Ms. Abetti, the following article shows that last year, 72% of ICE arrests were of someone with a criminal record. This year, only 52% are. So Trump’s ICE is being measurably less choosing of whose lives they upend.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/ice-trump-deportations-numbers-rcna188937

And: standing up against shenanigans like these hardly means “a country without borders.” If you’d like to discuss ICE and the most moral response to it, we should probably do so without the presence of “straw men” arguments.