Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed a pair of bills Thursday requiring local police departments to cooperate with federal immigration authorities – a policy that many advocates say will chill relationships between local law enforcement and immigrant communities.
Ayotte celebrated the new laws that will create a single policy for the state; previously each municipality could determine its own level of cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. She also said the policy is about protecting communities from crimes committed by undocumented people in what she called “sanctuary cities.”
“We are the safest state in the nation. We're going to continue to be that and this is a big step forward,” she said. “There will be no sanctuary cities in New Hampshire. Period. End of story.”
Ayotte, a former state attorney general, has frequently emphasized her relationship with police. She has also been vocal about encouraging state police and local law enforcement to establish 287(g) agreements that would allow those agencies to carry out immigration enforcement.
These laws are controversial; even calling them “sanctuary city bans” has been the subject of debate. While critics say that there are no sanctuary cities in New Hampshire, Republicans say that cities with welcoming ordinances count as such.
One of them is House bill sponsor Rep. Joe Sweeney, a Salem Republican who said that the newly-signed laws are “taking the handcuffs off” law enforcement.
“We made this a priority from day one in our contract with New Hampshire to ban sanctuary cities and sanctuary policies and anything that they want to call it. If they want to call it ‘welcoming policies,’ those are banned, too,” he said. “We're not going to have any elected official in the state of New Hampshire get in the way of law enforcement keeping our state safe.”
But critics disagree with these officials on what community safety means for immigration enforcement at a local level.
This new law has been proposed many times in previous sessions and drawn pushback from advocates and several New Hampshire police chiefs. They argued that immigration enforcement should be a federal responsibility and asking local law enforcement to enforce immigration would undermine relationships between local communities and police.
Longtime immigration advocate Eva Castillo has been at the center of many efforts to create closer relationships between immigrant communities and police. She has been witnessing what she considers a shift, as the Republican Legislature and the governor take a harder stance on immigration enforcement.
She agrees with deporting criminals who are undocumented, but worries about the ripple effects of this new law on immigrant communities. In this environment, she said that it is less likely for immigrants to cooperate with police, making it harder for police to do their job.
“If we feel unprotected by the police or threatened by the police, nobody is going to report crimes,” she said in Spanish. “Nobody is going to show up if they are witnesses of a crime and the police are not going to be able to do their job.”
Several local faith leaders have also registered concerns about the ripple effect of these policies.
Rev. Jason Wells leads St. Matthew’s Episcopal church in Goffstown and is part of the Granite State Organizing Project, an immigration advocacy coalition. He says he’s seen police departments working to build better relationships with their communities after fielding concerns of racial profiling. Now that these bills are signed into law, one of his biggest concerns is that they will increase racial profiling for residents who look different or speak English with a foreign accent.
“It really does corrode the positive relationship police and communities are trying to build to undo some of these works in the past,” he said. “It’s going to take us the wrong direction. It will hurt our communities and make us all less safe.”
Other immigration-related bills proposed this session include one that would make clear that New Hampshire doesn’t recognize licenses from other states held by undocumented immigrants. It passed both the House and the Senate and is likely to be signed by the governor soon.
