By Scott Brinton
Sergio Jimenez, of Amityville, an activist with an immigrant rights coalition that includes the Workplace Project in Hempstead, was recently approached by an acquaintance with an unusual proposition: The man asked whether Jimenez would take over his car payments.
The Honduran man had had enough of the Trump administration’s treatment of the immigrant community and planned to return to his home country. He needed someone to assume his car payments rather than abandon the vehicle.
“He’s going back to Honduras because he can’t stand all this suppression,” Jimenez said.
Jimenez spoke during a nearly two-hour conversation that The Advocate held last Wednesday at a restaurant down the street from Hempstead Town Hall, attended by 15 immigrants and advocates from the local community and beyond. They came to discuss President Trump’s immigration policy shift, with its increased focus on identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants.
The Advocate is not naming the restaurant to protect the privacy of its ownership.
Trump, Jimenez said, is ignoring the potential economic impact of tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of undocumented and documented immigrants returning to their home countries, either because they are forced or they choose to. If a growing number of immigrants leave, the economy will decline, he noted.
Immigrants comprise a third of Nassau County’s workforce and a third of its small business owners, and New York’s immigrants, documented and undocumented, pay more than $3.1 billion annually in state and local taxes, according to the New York Immigration Coalition.
Nadia Marin-Molina, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, with an office at the Freeport Workers Justice Center, said she believes the Trump administration aims to “make people’s lives miserable and to scare people, to terrorize people into leaving themselves, because they can’t deport everybody that they say they’re going to deport.”
To continue reading, click here.
