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NARR
Last month, Danbury joined dozens of towns and cities across the country want their police officers deputized as federal agents to enforce immigration law.
The program is called ICE ACCESS and it partners cops with the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Through the plan, two or three of Danbury's police detectives will be trained as immigration agents by the end of the year.
Mayor Mark Boughton (BOW - ton) says the detectives will have access to a federal database, which should be a big help when they investigate cases related to immigration, such as human trafficking, identity theft and gangs.
ACT: MARK BOUGHTON (:10):
So if they are investigating a murder, for example, and they find out the suspect may probably not be in the country legally, they're going to be able to pursue that a lot quicker than they would normally if we didn't have the training.
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Boughton says the program is not intended to sweep up illegal immigrants.
ACT: MARK BOUGHTON (:11)
If you're a criminal and you're involved in criminal activity, you should be afraid of this training. If you are a person that's going to their job everyday and raising their children and raising a family in Danbury, regardless of your status, you have nothing to worry about.
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Elise Marciano grew up in Danbury and leads a group for immigration control. She lobbied the town's council to approve the ICE ACCESS plan. She thinks it's needed to catch criminals who are in the country illegally.
ACT: ELISE MARCIANO (:15)
There's a lot of problems that they bring with them. Because they are poor, they are uneducated, they are sickly. And we just can't absorb that in our economy and just go on as if nothing happened.
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Crime in Danbury dropped 8 percent last year. Local lawyer David Bennett says the ICE ACCESS program will end up hurting Danbury and its economy because it is scaring immigrants and causing them to leave town.
ACT: DAVID BENNETT (:11):
I think it's the dumbest thing from a business perspective that any mayor of Danbury has ever done. I think it's going to have a chilling effect on community growth.
SOUND: street ambi up.
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Bennett knows two dozen people who have already left.
On Main Street, the town's immigrant hub, stores are struggling and some have closed.
Wilson Hernandez runs an Ecuadorian restaurant in downtown, right off the corner of Main Street, where trees line the sidewalk and brick buildings lend a quaint charm. It's lunchtime but few people pass by.
Since the town first started to consider the ICE plan last fall, Hernandez says business has dropped about 50 percent. CHECK
SOUND: street ambi cross fades to restaurant ambi, hold under
ACT: WILSON HERNANDEZ (:06):
People are afraid that ICE and the police department in Danbury are going to go after any immigrant or any person who looks like an immigrant and arrest them or question them about their legal status.
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Hernandez says immigrants, both legal and illegal, are moving to other Connecticut towns or out of state. In the doorway of his restaurant, a hot pink flyer pleads: Stay calm, stay in Danbury.
Hernandez worries about immigrants who do stay in Danbury and become victims of a crime.
ACT: WILSON HERNANDEZ (:04)
They are not going to report. They are not going to cooperate with the police.
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Hernandez says it's hard to know how many of Danbury's 10,000 to 20,000 immigrants have left. Some people are hiding at home. Brazilian native Celma Gomes Andrade (AN DRA GEE) didn't leave her house for three weeks in February.
SOUND: women speaking in Portuguese up, then fades as voiceover comes up
ACT: ANDRADE (:07)
Very scared. Very, very, very. Because I don't have papers, I'm scared to leave home.
Sound: street ambi under narr.
NARR
SOUND: Forum.
At a recent community forum with the mayor, residents, like Rosalina Tipton, had concerns about the ICE program.
ACT: Rosalina Tipton ( :08)
I feel there is racial profiling going on right now in Danbury. In one month I've been stopped three times by the police department for no good reason.
Mayor Boughton tried to allay hers and others' fears.
ACT: MARK BOUGHTON (:02):
Both sides think there are going to be sweeps and frankly there aren't.
NARR
But he is sticking to his pledge to deputize his detectives as immigration agents.
SOC:
Laura Isensee, Columbia Radio News.