Immigrants have a long history of arriving with entrepreneurial dreams and strong work ethics. Irma, one of NYC’s newest arrivals who made the long trek from Ecuador to build a better life for herself and her daughters, was no different.
She created business cards advertising her house-cleaning services. One day, she got a call from a woman offering her work. When Irma arrived with her cleaning supplies, she was horrified to find an apartment full of men waiting for her. She was repeatedly raped and kept for more than 10 hours in the apartment.
Finally, someone drove her home and told her they would kill her if she told anyone what they were doing, and that they would call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if she ever stopped responding when that same woman called with a new “job.” Irma didn’t have language for it at the time, but she was one of many immigrant women being trafficked in New York City.
When the same woman called Irma again, she believed she had no choice but to do what the woman told her. Irma was sexually trafficked twice more before she took the courageous step of changing her phone number to cut off contact with her traffickers, and seeking assistance.
At the Violence Intervention Program, we meet women like Irma all too often. As an organization working with Latine/x survivors of domestic and sexual violence, we work daily with immigrant New Yorkers sexually assaulted and/or exploited by traffickers as well as others in positions of power, like employers and landlords.
They often ask if going to the police about crimes committed against them will mean being reported to ICE. It’s a gamechanger when we can tell them this is a sanctuary city and that our law enforcement does not hand people over to ICE.
The people who trafficked Irma knew they had a double advantage — they thought the chances were small that she would report what happened, and they also believed that nobody would take her seriously.
Now, as Mayor Adams says he wants to roll back sanctuary laws in our city, the people who abused Irma would reap yet more advantages if the laws protecting immigrant crime victims are weakened.
Even with the laws we currently have in place, immigrants are already broadly fearful of law enforcement — and the risk of other city agencies’ collaborating with ICE — and have so many reasons not to seek assistance from them.
For recently arrived immigrants who are in shelter, living under constant surveillance puts them at increased risk; they have little to no privacy and a stressful moment can very quickly escalate with shelter staff engaging enforcement systems like police and child protective services with little justification.
Many immigrants come to our organization and others like it because we offer a safe place for them to get help. We were able to offer Irma counseling and social services to help her meet her basic needs and begin to process her trauma.
Unfortunately organizations like ours don’t usually have the capacity to track down her traffickers and shut down their operation. Irma would like the police to take action, but a prior attempt to talk to an officer led her to believe they would not take her seriously.
The mayor seems intent on making our city inhospitable to immigrants. Fear tactics work, and they could tragically keep abused mothers and children in unsafe conditions because they worry reporting abuse could lead to deportations and family separation.
Before the most recent expansion of the sanctuary laws, I represented a survivor who, at six months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her husband and was too frightened to go to the hospital because she was scared one or both of them could be deported.
Since the sanctuary laws have been in place, my colleagues and I have been able to support hundreds of survivors of domestic and sexual violence to get the legal protections and social services they need. These laws recognize the humanity of all New Yorkers and make our city safer and stronger.
If we remove the current protections we have for immigrant New Yorkers there will be many more vulnerable people and survivors who will get pushed further and further from any chance for justice, legal protections, and emergency interventions that they need. The ripple effect will span generations.
This is not the kind of city I and so many other New Yorkers want to live in.
We must stand united in demanding rights, dignity and safety for all in New York City.
Guzmán is the executive director at the Violence Intervention Program (VIP).
