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Grassroots coalitions in a growing number of states are working to pass legislation to cut municipal or state ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The efforts are gaining momentum as the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda throws long-standing problems with the nation’s immigration regime into sharp relief.

“We see a tremendous upswelling of this type of legislation being proposed in different states across the country,” Rebecca Sheff, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, told Truthout. “I think it speaks to the moment that it’s really a time to make the most of the political willingness to take bold action in light of how aggressive ICE has become.”

Sheff helped draft New Mexico’s Immigrant Safety Act, which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law in February. The law prohibits state and local governments from entering into agreements to detain individuals for civil immigration violations, stops the use of public land for immigration detention, and bans agreements that turn local law enforcement into immigration agents. It will come into force in May.

Comparable laws to curb civil immigration detention are already on the books in at least half a dozen other states, including New Jersey, California, Washington, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland. Many have been passed under the banner “Dignity, Not Detention,” following a national campaign launched in 2010 by the Detention Watch Network and hundreds of supporting organizations nationwide. California was the first to pass its Dignity, Not Detention legislation seven years later. New Mexico’s is the most recent.

Elsewhere, organizers are still hard at work on similar bills. Tania Mattos, executive director of UnLocal, a legal services provider for immigrants in New York City, is one of those organizers. She began working with Abolish ICE New York–New Jersey in 2018 and was part of the coalition that succeeded in passing New Jersey’s law ending certain contracts with ICE three years later.

ICE Wants to Buy Warehouses for Mass Detention. Communities Are Fighting Back.

Mattos got involved after learning about conditions in immigration jails. “During my immigration advocacy work, I realized that people had a huge fear [of immigration detention], and people were dying in immigration detention,” she told Truthout. “It’s a black hole, and people go into these black holes not knowing whether they’re going to come out, how long they’re going to be in, not having legal representation — it’s literally kidnapping and disappearing folks into these systems.”

Now, Mattos is working to abolish immigration detention in New York with the state’s Dignity Not Detention Coalition. That coalition includes more than 150 public health and safety organizations, labor unions, and civil rights and faith groups that are pushing forward Senate Bill 316 and Assembly Bill 4181, sponsored by New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Karines Reyes, respectively.

The companion bills, together known as the Dignity Not Detention Act, would prohibit New York entities and persons from owning or operating........

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