After Donald Trump was elected to a second presidential term in 2024, New Haven’s venerable immigrant rights organization, Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), began beefing up its support team of local citizens who accompany undocumented immigrants to court appointments while keeping watch in and around the courthouse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. For groups like ULA, court support is an urgently important practice: While previous administrations barred ICE from making arrests at “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, and courthouses, Trump issued an Executive Order eliminating that policy immediately after taking office.
But the threat posed to immigrants by the Trump Administration hit particularly close to home one day in March, when, as an ULA team waited in a coffee shop downtown for an ULA member who appeared to be running late for a court date, the group was dismayed to learn that he’d been apprehended by ICE and was on his way to an immigration detention center. He was subsequently deported.
Though New Haven is a small city of 135,000 people, the robust response to Trump’s mass deportation efforts by its government entities, nonprofits, grassroots groups, and immigrant communities has enhanced its reputation as a “welcoming city” that will fight for the safety of all residents, regardless of their immigration status. In addition to New Haven’s ban on police collaborating with ICE, an executive order passed by Elicker directs all city staff, not just police, to decline to cooperate with federal immigration officials on solely immigration-related matters. The resistance efforts have also extended to its largest suburb, Hamden, where the Legislative Council passed an ordinance in late April codifying Mayor Lauren Garrett’s executive order extending protections to its immigrant population.
But as in every city, the path to effectively protecting immigrants is uncertain. “I think it’s early for us to know how things are going—they change dramatically every day,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker tells The Progressive. “We’ve retrained all our staff on the Welcoming City Executive Order. We’re doing what we can within the law and within our powers.”
IRIS
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and other community leaders discuss resources and support for immigrants in New Haven, January 2025.
Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding through the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from so-called sanctuary cities—a term with no official definition, but which is often used to describe municipalities that refuse to aid or cooperate with federal immigration officials. After a handful of California cities and counties sued the Trump Administration over this threat in February, New Haven jumped on board, and has remained the only jurisdiction in the Northeast to do so. On April 24, a federal district court judge issued a preliminary injunction against the withholding of funds from the jurisdictions that sued, after ruling that this action would be unconstitutional. On April 28, Trump told Attorney General Pam Bondi to compile a list of cities, counties, and states that the administration views as providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, threatening yet again to withhold federal funds from those municipalities.
Elicker says although the situation is not yet resolved, it’s a great example of why he believes that cities should fight Trump’s immigration agenda rather than try to accommodate his demands. The funds at risk of being pulled from New Haven amount to about $6 million—a relatively small slice of its total federal funding, which the city uses to fund its public schools, health programs, and nonprofits, alongside other services and initiatives. Elicker says that none of its DOJ-issued funds have actually been withheld yet, though tens of millions in other approved funding has been suspended or terminated due to its relation to climate change, including a competitive $20 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for coastal resilience and a $25 million grant from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for flooding abatement. (The city sued the Trump Administration over its cancellation of the EPA funding, and on May 20, a federal court ordered that they reinstate three federal EPA grants totalling $31 million.)
At the center of the city’s immigrant support effort is the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, which formed after Trump took office this year and includes official government entities such as the city’s police and health departments alongside immigrant groups, leftwing grassroots organizations, and nonprofits. The Coalition has played a key role in the community’s response to the news that Avelo Airlines, the budget airline that considers New Haven its East Coast hub, signed a contract with the Trump Administration in April to conduct deportation flights out of Mesa, Arizona. It helped lead a protest at Tweed New Haven Airport on May 12, when Avelo’s first deportation flights were scheduled, and launched an online petition calling for a boycott of the airline which has now garnered more than 35,000 signatures.
The Coalition includes Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), a prominent and respected refugee resettlement organization known for its public outreach. Unlike some similar groups, IRIS makes no attempt to fly under the radar of public awareness, which has allowed the group to develop a broad base of donors and volunteers for its innovative programs.
Immediately after taking office in January, Trump cancelled the Refugee Resettlement Program, as well as a $3 million grant that had already been issued to IRIS under the Biden Administration. The loss of funds forced IRIS to lay off nearly half of its staffers and to close its main building, which had been a multilingual hub of activities such as sewing g, tutoring, and English classes for both kids and adults. The community has rallied around IRIS; despite a snowstorm the night before, its annual road race and walk fundraiser in early February received its largest ever turnout.
IRIS Executive Director Maggie Mitchell Salem tells The Progressive that its Welcome Corps and Reception and Placement programs, which provided critical support for refugees, Afghan allies and Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders during their first ninety days in the country, ended in January. “By September 30,” she says, “we expect almost all federal funding to become inaccessible. So, we are planning for a future without any federal funding, looking to private funding including foundations and state support, which has been terrific.”
The group’s efforts have had a wide reach. In 2024, IRIS served nearly 1,000 refugees, between 1,500 and 2,000 humanitarian parolees, and dozens of asylum seekers, as well as thirty to fifty undocumented arrivals each month.
“We have laid off staff who have come back as volunteers to lead teams of other volunteers,” says Mitchell Salem. “A local alderwoman set a goal of getting thirty new volunteers in three days and we recruited 300.” She also says that donors have offered to accelerate their annual gifts. “People are sending donations and telling stories of how their family members were immigrants and came to America. People have connections to our work, even if they never had a direct connection.”
Mitchell Salem says that with funds from other groups, including veterans groups, IRIS has welcomed three Afghan families of seven members each and one individual Afghan. IRIS was expecting to welcome more than 800 refugees this year. “That’s not going to happen. We are no longer a refugee resettlement organization, but we are still an immigrant-serving organization, and that’s what we’re leaning into.”
Ambar Santiago-Rojas, a high school senior and activist who helps lead another New Haven Immigrants Coalition group called Semilla Collective, is more willing to speak out than many others in New Haven’s immigrant community due to her status as a U.S. citizen from birth. She has led several Know Your Rights trainings, which provide instruction on how to respond when confronted by ICE, in venues such as high schools.
New Haven Immigrants
New Haven Immigrants Coalition partners Junta for Progressive Action and Semilla Collective - Colectivo Semilla New Haven lead a Know Your Rights training, March 2025.
“During Inauguration Week people were posting about ICE sightings in multiple places in New Haven. Everyone was freaking out,” Santiago-Rojas says. “We posted a video on Instagram about how to properly post ICE sightings; we send people out to see if ICE is actually in the ‘hood, then we make a post if people send us photos and videos.” The social media posts include the Coalition’s rapid response number so that community members can get in touch with questions or information.
In late April, after several Know Your Rights training sessions, Semilla Collective held a “Train the Trainers” workshop with more than eighty volunteers hoping to become Know Your Rights trainers in attendance. “It was a lot of work, but in the end it was so worth it,” Santiago-Rojas says. “It’s a lot of information, but people were having a good time, asking a lot of questions. They practiced teaching each other and role-playing as ICE agents and immigrants at home, at work, in public, and while driving.”
While a few Hispanic families attended the workshop, Santiago-Rojas says that most participants were white. “The main reason for [immigrants] not showing up is because of fear. We canvassed in Fair Haven”—the heart of the immigrant community— “and a business owner said business was down [by 40 percent since Trump took office.”
Santiago-Rojas says that living in a mixed status family under the Trump regime has not been easy. She says she carries a Red Card—a wallet-sized card commonly distributed throughout the country that lists immigrant rights and instructions in both Spanish and English for responding to ICE.
“My family is very well prepared,” she says. “We know our rights, and we know lawyers. We’re cautious about what we do. Unlike a lot of other immigrant families, we haven’t been staying home; we still do our regular things. We know so many people in New Haven will have our backs if anything happens. But it is kind of scary.”