It is more than a month since the Mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, announced that there would be no renewal of the city’s contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). PARS, the preliminary arrangement reporting system, gave ICE real-time access to a database used for targeting undocumented immigrants, according to community members and local activists.
Kenney decided to end the arrangement following meetings with immigration activists and pressure from protesters with Abolish ICE. The executive director of Juntos, an immigration advocacy group, Erika Almiron, said that the policy change was down to immigrants who were willing to share with city officials the negative experiences they have undergone.
Juntos is one of the main advocates of changes to immigration, and one of the major fixtures of its agenda has been ending the PARS agreement. The non-profit organization now intends to continue to develop an initiative for the monitoring of law enforcement. The Community Resistance Zones program developed by Juntos, which began in South Philadelphia, is a door-to-door effort to try to get city residents to alert others when unauthorized immigrants are targeted by authorities or are interacting with law enforcement.
More than 500 people have signed with the program, with another 1,300 having undergone “knowing your rights” training in the 11 months since the program was first launched, in November 2017. A hotline and an app designed to send real-time alerts will also feature in the effort.