Scores rally at City Hall to demand Mayor Parker reaffirm Philly's sanctuary city status

PHILADELPHIA — About 75 immigration activists and supporters rallied Tuesday outside City Hall to demand that Mayor Cherelle L. Parker forcefully speak up for Philadelphia’s status as a sanctuary city.

”Sanctuary for one is sanctuary for all!” Erika Guadalupe Núñez, executive director of Juntos, declared to the crowd, which cheered and banged drums in response. “This is the time for intentional action.”

Demonstrators representing at least six organizations gathered in the afternoon on the south side of City Hall, beside the statue of civil rights activist Octavius Catto and not far from the blinking lights of a holiday carousel, where they drew blaring honks from passing cars. After an hour they swept across John F. Kennedy Boulevard and north on Broad Street, on their way to the Philadelphia ICE office at Eighth and Cherry Streets, where they held a vigil on behalf of detained immigrants.

Philadelphia has been among the strongest of sanctuary cities, places that deliberately limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, but Parker has passed on chances to firmly reassert the city’s stance.

“Mayor, if you support immigrants, then please stand up and say, ‘I am going to support the sanctuary city policy,’” said Julio Rodriguez, political director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group. “This ambiguity is unacceptable.”

This year, he noted, the mayor celebrated Immigrant Heritage Month along with the city’s status as a Certified Welcoming City.

”Depending on the month, she is pro-immigrant,” Rodriguez said. “This is not one of those months.”

The mayor’s spokesperson, Joe Grace, said Tuesday that the administration’s comment on the matter was the same as it offered last week: The administration is focused on improving public safety and quality of life for Philadelphians, not on responding to the rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of immigrants.

Grace said the 2016 executive order by the city on detainers — it directs workers to respond to judicial warrants, not to ICE-issued detainers to hold immigrants in custody — remains in place.

“The Parker administration remains laser-focused on the agenda that Philadelphians elected her to implement: making Philadelphia a safer, cleaner, greener city, with access to economic opportunity for all,” Grace said earlier.

The rally came as Parker nears the end of her first year in office and as Trump, to be inaugurated next month, pledges aggressive action on sanctuary cities across the United States.

Parker’s cautiousness around sanctuary has leaders in local immigrant communities concerned that people could be made vulnerable at a moment when Trump is promising to deport millions of undocumented migrants, among them about 47,000 in Philadelphia.

“This is the time for the mayor to speak up for the people,” said Jay Lee, the advocacy and communications manager at the Worri Center, the Asian American justice group that took part in the rally. “The city is our home. We need to protect our rights, defend our neighbors.”

City Councilmember Rue Landau, who has called for “Trump Preparedness” hearings, told those at the rally that they had gathered not just to protect a policy but also to defend a principle — “that our city will not be a place of fear, but a place of safety.”

“Let me be clear,” she said. “We will not reverse our sanctuary city policy on my watch. … I will do everything in my power to ensure that public resources will never be used to support federal deportation efforts, track and target people based on their national origin, or enforce discriminatory laws.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said all citizens have the right to peacefully protest and to have their voices heard.

“However, we must point out that noncooperation policies endanger the city’s citizens, law enforcement officers, and noncitizens themselves. We urge city leaders to work with ICE in protecting their citizens and residents,” the spokesperson said.

Sanctuary cities have become an increasingly volatile political issue and potential vulnerability for Democrats, who after a bruising national electoral loss are trying to regain voters who think the party is weak on immigration.

Parker said during her campaign last year that she supports Philadelphia being a sanctuary city, but neither she nor other candidates made it a significant issue.

Some see the mayor’s approach as politically astute, given the unpredictability of Trump administration policy.

Larry Ceisler, a public affairs executive based in Philadelphia, earlier told The Inquirer that Parker’s language was “responsibly cautious” in the wake of Trump’s election.

“She’s walking a really fine line here,” Ceisler said. “And you’re dealing with a potential of an administration in Washington like no one’s ever dealt with before — one that speaks openly about retribution and vindictiveness.”

Trump has pledged to undertake the largest mass-deportation program in American history, and his advisers are discussing how to strip federal funding from Democratic-run cities if their leaders refuse to help him. Trump has said he would ask Congress to pass a law outlawing sanctuary cities and demand that the “full weight of the federal government” fall upon jurisdictions that decline to cooperate with ICE.

Sanctuary cities generally refuse to deputize their local police officers as acting ICE agents, and some places, including the state of New Jersey, have sought to ban the creation of immigrant-detention centers.

The message from Parker has been much less absolute, contrasting not only with some Democratic leaders in other cities but also with her predecessor, former Mayor Jim Kenney.

The Kenney administration fought and won a major federal lawsuit in 2018 over Trump’s effort to make local police enforce federal immigration laws, kicked ICE out of a database it believed the agency was using to find undocumented people, and barred city employees from asking residents about their immigration status.

Philadelphia and other sanctuary jurisdictions typically do not honor ICE-issued detainers to keep undocumented people in custody beyond their court-determined release date, responding only to judicial warrants to do so. Leaders in sanctuary cities say they could be sued if they obeyed administrative ICE detainers and held people beyond the release dates set by judges.

Other places and states say law enforcement officers, federal and local, must work together to deport people who are in the country illegally. States including Florida, Arizona, and Texas passed laws banning sanctuary cities.

Mayor Parker “has a chance to be a leader and really stand strong,” said Peter Pedemonti, codirector of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, as he stood with others at the rally. The mayor speaking out would send “a message to the immigrant communities in Philly that the city is behind them.”