The Danbury, Connecticut city council voted 18-2 this week to allow non-citizen migrants — including DACA recipients — to serve as police officers. The vote came as a direct response to ICE conducting immigration enforcement operations in the city.
So the city's answer to federal agents enforcing federal law is to hand badges to people whose legal status is, shall we say, complicated.
City Council Member Joe Britton framed the vote as a message of solidarity. "I do think it's timely, and this vote sends a message to our immigrant community that you are welcome in Danbury," Britton said. He also offered a military analogy: "In the Army, I learned quickly your background doesn't matter when you put on the uniform. Same team."
The comparison would be more persuasive if the U.S. Army didn't require its recruits to be citizens or lawful permanent residents. But details.
Mayor Roberto Alves — who publicly disclosed that he himself was undocumented when he first arrived in the country — has been vocal about his opposition to the ICE operations. "We don't see folks going to the stores," Alves said. "We still see parents scared to send kids to school." The city's school enrollment has dropped by approximately 700 students since the previous year, with the decline concentrated among English-language learners and low-income students.
That enrollment drop is genuinely worth examining, because it tells a story the mayor probably doesn't intend. If 700 families pulled their kids from school because ICE showed up, that's 700 families who knew they were in this country illegally and were fine using resources, like public schools, that are only available to tax-paying citizens.
The city says applicants will undergo the same background checks as any other police candidate. Only two of the twenty council members voted against the measure.
The structural absurdity here isn't subtle. Danbury watched federal officers enforce immigration law within city limits and responded by creating a pathway for the people those laws apply to to become the ones wearing the badge. A non-citizen DACA recipient could, under this policy, be dispatched to a domestic disturbance, a traffic stop, or a crime scene — exercising the state's monopoly on force while their own legal status depends on an executive-branch program that's been challenged in court repeatedly.
Eighteen council members voted yes. Two voted no. Seven hundred kids stopped showing up to school. And the city's solution is to put more people with uncertain federal status into positions of local authority.
