The Orange County Correctional Facility has a longstanding contract with  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain immigrants in the state while officers are actively conducting raids on local communities and putting people, including children, into detainment. 

In New York activists have been campaigning on the legislative level to end state and local collaboration with ICE through the Dignity Not Detention ACT that would end all immigrant detention contracts state, county and municipal entities currently have with ICE and bar them from entering into new contracts.

Recently, The River Reporter reported on an ICE raid at Elegante Restaurant and Pizzeria in Honesdale, during which ICE agents arrested and detained three of the establishment’s employees

This raid followed the detainment of a mother and her three children, including a third-grader and two high school students, back in April at a dairy farm in Jefferson County and their subsequent transfer to a detention facility in Texas.

President Trump deployed the California National Guard to Los Angeles last Sunday to crack down on demonstrators, as protests also erupted in other cities such as Chicago and New York City against the ongoing ICE raids.

Radio Catskill’s Julia Kim spoke with Tania Mattos, executive director of the non-profit UnLocal, which provides legal representation, community education and other services to undocumented immigrants in New York, on what the Dignity Not Detention Act is and aims to address. 

Kim also spoke to Samah Sisay, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City who specializes in fighting discriminatory immigration policies, on Orange County Correctional Facility in particular fits into this conversation. 

Here’s Tania Mattos…