At a community center in New Haven, members of the immigrant community are putting on a kind of play. Two volunteers pretend to cook over a stove when another pair acting as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents comes knocking at the cardboard cutout of a door.
This is the set up for a skit that undocumented advocates put on at their Know Your Rights training sessions. Rojas helps organize them.
“I am committed to waking my people up so they know that he, she or they can share with others their rights,” Rojas said.
Rojas is an immigrant who is actively involved with the undocumented community in her city. She’s asked to not use her full name for the safety of herself and the undocumented community she works with.
She’s worried because of recent allegations that federal immigration officers have wrongfully detained residents in New England and beyond. At Boston Logan Airport recently, two people with legal immigration status were detained. One had a green card and was detained. The other had a legal work visa and was deported.
“It makes me nervous,” Rojas said in Spanish. “It makes me think of how we can be even more strategic with these kinds of attacks.”
Part of that strategy is teaching people their constitutional rights, because she said it’s now more important than ever for people to know how to use them if they ever interact with an ICE agent.
“Being out and about is scary, but I am committed to planting those seeds, because I know they’ll bloom,” Rojas said.
Blah-blah-blah, cha-cha-cha and practice
The Know Your Rights workshop Rojas and her fellow activists put on has three parts. She calls them the “blah, blah, blah”, the “cha, cha, cha” and then “practice, practice, practice.”
The “blah, blah, blah” is a lecture in which activists explicitly tell audience members their rights. The New Haven Immigrants Coalition has a slideshow presentation with the majority of the constitutional rights that Rojas goes over in her own presentation. It is available in English and Spanish.
Trainees then get to see these rights in action with skits, during the “cha, cha, cha” portion of the workshop.
“The skit is a theatrical way to get as close as we can to reality and to expose our trainees in different scenarios so they can think about it, feel about it, and then practice it,” Rojas said.
Scenarios include what to do when you are at home, in your car, at your workplace and when you’re in a public area.
Rojas and her team provide handout copies of a legitimate court-ordered warrant signed by a judge and an ICE administrative order. With an administrative order, you do not need to open the door, Rojas said, but it is a common tactic immigration agents use to gain entry into someone’s home, so it’s important to know the distinction.
“If [the ICE agents] come with different tricks, just don't fall for it,” Rojas said. “If [the agents] say, ‘We have here a document that proves that we can get into your house.’ [You should say] ‘Okay, just slide it [under] the door.’”
Then comes “practice, practice, practice.”
Rojas has all the trainees line up in pairs with partners facing each other. With one person as themselves and the other person as an ICE agent, they’ll practice the skills they’ve learned using different scenarios that Rojas poses.
The 'each one teach one' approach
This April, Rojas’ advocacy group is starting a new program called “Train the Trainer.” The idea is to train people how to give these Know Your Rights workshops.
“This is intended to be in the safety of your house,” she said. Imagine it like a gathering, she said, where Mexican sweet corn cake and coffee is served.
“We are going to have tomalitos, café and know your rights,” Rojas said. The goal is to offer training sessions to people who are too afraid to go out in public.
“Can you imagine if we can train 40 people this time, and then the next session, they invite one, just one, one of the people that they train to come to another 'Train the Trainer?' Now we are going to have 80 people,” she said. “It makes a huge difference.”
Prepare a layered defense
At Castle Church in Norwich, Philip Berns was giving a Know Your Rights presentation with the Latino advocacy group LEAD late into the night in March. The people in the audience either spoke English, Spanish or Haitian Creole. Thankfully, Berns speaks all three languages.
Berns, an immigration attorney based in Stamford, has been giving Know Your Rights presentations since 2006. When President Donald Trump returned to office, Berns ramped up to offer about two presentations a week.
He likes to teach people a strategy for how to use a red card (la tarjeta roja). Think of it like a business card, but instead of your contact information, it has your constitutional rights listed. You can give it to an immigration agent if you’re unable to verbally state your rights, he said.
He recommends having at least six red cards on hand at all times and to give them out to each agent you interact with, but he said you should save the last one for the deportation judge to show that if you were detained, it was done while violating your constitutional rights.
“You just have to be ready to have a layered defense,” Berns said.
Knowing which of your rights were violated is the best way to defend yourself when facing a deportation judge if you end up detained, which is why, Berns said, Know Your Rights training is still “absolutely” important regardless of the cases of alleged wrongful detentions.
It also helps to have a video recording of the interaction with the immigration agent, Berns said, another right that Berns teaches people they have.
“They're going to take your phone away from you, so you're not gonna be able to record it yourself,” he said. “It's going to have to be other people.”
That’s where bystanders can act as allies, he said.
Open the door to your community
Both Berns and Rojas agree that these workshops are not just for the undocumented. They’re for family members, friends and neighbors, regardless of immigration status.
“If you know your rights, you know that you don't have to open the door, and that is the single biggest line of defense you have against [ICE agents] picking up anybody they're looking for,” Berns said. “For all the other people in the house that [the ICE agents] are not looking for, but I suspect will likely pick up just to drive their numbers up, if they know their rights, then they can protect themselves against deportation [too].”
In Spanish, Rojas and her fellow activists have a saying.
“Close the door on ICE,” she said. “Open the door to your community.”
Learn More
- Latinos for Educational Advocacy and Diversity, or LEAD, hosts immigration seminars and workshops across their various community centers in Connecticut. You can find updates of their programming on their social media.
- New Haven Immigrants offers Know Your Rights resources that include:
- Presentations that detail your rights at home, in the car, at work and in public places.
- Examples of a judge-signed warrant and an ICE administrative order.
- A one-page sheet with your constitutional rights listed for different locations and with a phone number to get rapid assistance during an encounter with an ICE agent.
- The Immigrant Legal Resource Center provides red cards that you can print out in nearly 20 languages, including English and Spanish.
