Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin Op-Ed, 11/15/2024
How Trump’s immigration policy could impact Binghamton, Broome County
William Martin, Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University, writes about the implications Trump’s deportation policy could have in Broome County.
Anticipating President-elect Trump’s arrival, they are preparing to close the southern border. Not the United States, but Canada, which is expecting a surge of refugees across its border with the U.S. And New York State is again the passageway from south to north. How will local officials and agencies react?
For Broome County, Trump’s policies portend a bonanza or a disaster depending on where you sit, what forces you control, and whose interests you serve.
The financial benefit is already in place: the county now gets $100 to $300 per day for every federal detainee held in the jail. Indeed it’s a way to maximize county profits by using, as explicitly stated in 2024 County Budget objectives (p153), “available cell space to generate revenue” by housing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees.
Meanwhile, the county has forcefully acted to prevent refugees from settling here. In May 2023, Democratic County Executive Jason Garnar was among the first of over 30 upstate counties to declare a state of emergency, which prohibited local hotels from housing refugees and migrants. Republican Broome County Sheriff Frederick Akshar promptly dispatched deputies to enforce the order.
Gov. Hochul has recently contributed to the effort by allocating over $2 million to Broome County and local city governments to vastly expand policing and surveillance devices. More identification, stops, and searches are on the way. The Sheriff alone is putting in 65 more cameras with his $834,000, adding to the City of Binghamton’s existing and expanding system. SUNY Binghamton has its own system, too.
Much more is coming. Trump promises that money is no object in the effort to track, detain and hold migrants and refugees. Funding will be in the billions — some estimates run to $1 trillion — raising new possibilities and dangers. Finding millions of migrants will require the assistance of state and local police departments. Nearby federal detainee centers, as in Batavia, have little or no room — thus the reliance already on county jails. Broome County’s jail, expanded in 2016 to house 600 persons, now regularly has less than half that number. Will refugees and migrants soon fill it? Empty local dormitories and apartments — as in the still-vacant Bible School Park complex in Johnson City — are other possibilities.
Broome County has a mixed historical record here, welcoming at times large inflows of migrants, most notably from southern and eastern Europe. In the 1920s during the last Great Depression and worldwide trade war, Binghamton became the state headquarters of the Klu Klux Klan, hosting Klan meetings, hillside cross burnings and hooded parades on Main Street, including marches against non-Protestant, most prominently Catholic and Italian, immigrants.
Faced with radical new federal policies and billions, what will county, city, and police officials do? What plans are being put in place now? How will local community leaders, including pastors and the Broome County Council of Churches, and social service organizations, respond? We do not know. Let the conversation begin, in public.
William Martin is Professor Emeritus, SUNY-Binghamton.
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