Immigrant rights advocates outline 2020 legislative priorities

Make the Road activists at their Jackson Heights office in August. Eagle file photo by Victoria Merlino.

By Victoria Merlino

Immigrant rights advocacy group Make the Road New York urged state lawmakers to keep ICE out of New York courts, decriminalize sex work and adopt campaign finance reforms in a new platform that laid out the organization’s goals for the 2020 state legislative session.  

The platform explicitly supports 10 bills that will be under consideration in the upcoming legislative session. Among them are the Protect Our Courts Act, which would put restrictions on ICE from making arrests in and around New York courthouses; the Solutions Not Suspensions Act, which proponents say would disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline; and repealing Section 50-a, a law that shields police records from public view.

Make the Road members rallied in their Jackson Heights office to unveil the platform. The organization counts 24,000 New Yorkers as members. 

“We made substantial progress in Albany last year, but there remains an enormous amount of work left to do to ensure that our communities are treated with respect and dignity,” Make the Road Co-Executive Director Javier Valdés said in a statement.

So far this year, seven people have been arrested inside New York City courthouses, including one person in Queens Criminal Court, according to the Office of Court Administration. At least 112 people, including 22 in Queens, have been arrested by ICE just outside courthouses, according to a report by the Immigrant Defense Project.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced in September that she is suing ICE over courthouse arrests in September, calling them a “major disruption.” 

Queens activists have also spoken out against Section 240.37 of the penal code, a law that allows police to arrest a person for stopping, talking and beckoning to others in a public place. Activists say the law is often arbitrarily used against transgender women profiled sex workers.

“As a trans woman, I demand we do more to protect our trans community,” said Kathy Garcia, a member of Make the Road. “We must repeal New York’s loitering for the purposes of prostitution law, that discriminatorily hurts TGNCNB people. We should be able to express ourselves and walk in our neighborhoods without being targeted simply because we are trans.”