WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Dartmouth student Wren Hyacinth was guiding a group of 200 protesters who blocked traffic in White River Junction earlier this month when they saw a woman get out of her car and confront some of the activists.
For Hyacinth and other members of Rise! Upper Valley, it was a moment to bridge a gap.
Hyacinth spoke to the woman, trying to explain that the protest was to protect undocumented people from being detained and deported.
“We got through to her, which isn’t surprising. … If you talk to a human like they’re a human, you’ll get through to them,” Hyacinth said, adding, “We’re all part of this community and we all know each other.”
That sentiment is steeped in the identity of the new group, which comprises Upper Valley community members, including residents, students and undocumented people.
They held the protest at the intersection of routes 5 and 14 on Aug. 14 to oppose the recent arrests of 18 people in the Upper Valley by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“After speaking to some of the detainees’ co-workers, it was clear that ICE has been immorally preying upon this community as it has been nationwide,” Rise! wrote in a collective statement on the protests. “These sweeps are happening too swiftly for us to process the trauma we are witnessing and feeling within ourselves.”
The demonstration was just one part of the group’s overall mission. Rise! — many of whose members are people of color and LGBTQ — says it represents some of society’s most marginalized groups. The grassroots group formed through the spring and summer, when local community activists such as Asma Elhuni met and collaborated with Dartmouth student activists including Hyacinth. The group has no hierarchy and no single leader; rather it relies on different members to bring their individual skills and experience to the movement.
“The diversity makes us that much more powerful and effective,” said attorney Kira Kelley, a Hartland resident and member of Rise! who advises the group on their legal rights.
Since forming — the name was inspired by the Maya Angelou poem “Still I Rise” — the group has focused much of its attention on fighting for the rights of undocumented people in the Upper Valley. The group has held protests and support groups, planned educational sessions, and made efforts to push a policy change or ordinance through the Hartford Selectboard that it says will help protect members of the undocumented community.
“Rise! works to center the voices of people who are most affected by societal issues and interlocking oppressions,” Hyacinth said. “It’s fighting to make life better for those communities.”
For Elhuni, a longtime community organizer, part of the message she hopes to impart is an understanding of what marginalized people have to go through. Originally from Libya, Elhuni previously served as the lead organizer for the United Valley Interfaith Project and the communications outreach director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“Now is a time that we can’t afford to be silent and fall back in the shadows,” Elhuni said.
She pointed to the racism and aggression that Rise! members have experienced while speaking out in support of undocumented residents at community meetings. Elhuni recalls one area resident threatening to run over Rise! activists with a car. Another wore a hat emblazoned with the word “ICE” to a Hartford Selectboard meeting, and several people who have spoken at meetings have referred to undocumented people — specifically those associated with Rise! — as “illegals.”
“We constantly feel like this isn’t our space. It’s painful,” Elhuni said. “How can anyone’s existence be illegal?”
Much of the contention Elhuni references came to a head over the summer, with a proposed ordinance that would prohibit Hartford police from sharing information about a person’s immigration status with federal authorities. Rise! took to Selectboard meetings, vocally supporting the measure, even as tensions within the Hartford community flared.
The debate that would become a focus of Rise!’s work started in early June when, with urging from local activists, Hartford town officials began to consider changes to the town’s existing Fair and Impartial Policing Policy. The changes would have included restricting local law enforcement’s communication with ICE about a person’s immigration status.
“This is a real fear for us,” Elhuni recalled telling Selectboard members before explaining the concerns residents have about federal law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “I know you say police are our friends, but they’re not when they’re picking up people’s family members.”
But following pushback from some Hartford residents, the Selectboard decided to consider a “Welcoming Hartford Ordinance,” which would establish clearer guidelines for when Hartford police and other town employees could communicate with federal authorities about a person’s immigration status, and when they couldn’t.
The ordinance initially prompted further pushback from the police, who said it was in direct violation of a federal law that says no government agency, including a town, can prohibit communication to the Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding citizenship or immigration status.
“The Selectboard has been working for a long time on equity, diversity and inclusion in town. I think the ordinance provides them an opportunity to talk more about that work,” Hartford Police Chief Phil Kasten said in an interview. But, he added, “That discussion and those initiatives shouldn’t be tied to requiring law enforcement to violate the law.”
A working group for the town amended the ordinance, including a so-called “savings clause” explicitly stating that it doesn’t restrict law enforcement from sending information to federal authorities regarding a person’s immigration status.
“We’ve concluded that we can’t pass an unamended ordinance without causing a disruption to the police department,” Selectboard Chair Simon Dennis said last week. That disruption would have a negative effect on the community as a whole, he contended, adding that Hartford police already have a policy within their department that prohibits officers from asking a person’s immigration status.
Now the board will decide on Tuesday whether to bring the matter directly to voters at Town Meeting, and it could be either an amendment to the policing policy or the Welcoming Hartford Ordinance. (The Selectboard also could adopt a municipal ordinance on its own, but that could then be brought to a Town Meeting vote if 5% of voters signed a petition in opposition.)
The town has been moving in a progressive direction, Dennis said, but something like the original wording of the ordinance, which Hartford police and their supporters opposed, could cause some turmoil if it came to a townwide vote.
“That can swing back. They’ll vote in a very different Selectboard and it would lead to a lot of other positive, progressive things getting repealed,” Dennis said.
The goal of the Selectboard, for now, is to figure out “how to frame this issue so that when the voters vote on it, they pass it,” Dennis said.
For members of Rise!, who have vocally thrown their support behind the unamended ordinance over the past two months, the savings clause came as a blow.
“The amended ordinance takes away the safety we want and asked for,” Elhuni said, asserting that the federal law that makes it illegal for cities or towns to bar communications with ICE is unconstitutional.
If passed, the unamended ordinance could be a way for the town of Hartford to take a stance against the federal law, said Kelley, a recent graduate of Vermont Law School, where she served as treasurer of the Native American Law Student Association.
Dennis agreed that he thinks the federal law is unconstitutional, but said town officials have determined Hartford probably would have trouble proving it had suffered harm from the prohibition, a requirement for bringing suit in such cases.
The heart of the Rise!’s argument for an unamended ordinance is its concern that Hartford police may share information (especially on a person’s immigration status) with ICE. The original Welcoming Hartford Ordinance would protect against that, but not with the savings clause, they argue.
“What if ICE comes to our town? Will the police really collaborate?” Elhuni said, referencing some of the key questions Rise! has asked in recent months.
She said it’s hard to take the word of police at face value.
“For people of color, it is extremely difficult to trust the police,” she said.
Elhuni referenced the recent arrests by Customs and Border Protection and said three residents in the Upper Valley told her they learned Border Patrol communicated with Hartford Police before and after the raids.
Kasten has denied that Hartford police collaborated with federal authorities during the raid. He said Customs and Border Protection called police during the arrests because they needed help with a scale to measure drugs found at the scene, but that Hartford police did not share information on residents or their immigration status. They did not have any other communication with federal authorities before the arrests, he said.
“No policy would have stopped or prevented” the arrests, he added.
Kasten said he recognizes the trust issues that exist between some members of the community and the police.
“This issue is a national issue that has a lot of national attention. That translates into people’s concerns,” he said. But he’s worried about the effect national issues are having on the debate.
“We have to make sure we don’t translate the national political discussion to something that’s occurring here locally,” he said.
For Rise! members like Elhuni, the debate boils down — at least in part — to what they feel is a lack of understanding on the part of police and the Selectboard about what people of color and undocumented people are facing. She worried that members of the Selectboard have balked at enacting a change for fear of creating political turmoil in town.
“Chaos is already in our lives,” Elhuni said. “Their lives are not in jeopardy.”
Anna Merriman can be reached at annalouisemerriman@gmail.com.