Fair and Welcoming Orange, NJ Statement of Principle

Dear Mayor Warren,

The City of Orange is an ethnically, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse community. This is a source of our municipality’s strength. We are committed to ensuring that all our residents can live and pursue their livelihoods in peace and prosperity. Like many Americans, we are deeply concerned about how the new presidential administration is impacting the lives of immigrants and their families, whether they will be forced to leave this country, and whether rights and protections afforded to them will suddenly be taken away. Our city must resist any attempts to target vulnerable communities and help facilitate mass deportations. Community policing depends on trust with every community member and these practices strike a blow to that effort.

As residents, workers, business owners, and institutions of the community, we call on you to join a growing number of cities around the country in standing up to these threats against our privacy and liberties by taking meaningful steps to ensure that our communities are safe, that all of our rights are respected, and that Orange continues to thrive. Our community is safer and stronger because of its diversity. We call on you, our elected executive, to join with the City Council who passed a Fair & Welcoming Resolution on February 7, 2017.

The following is a list of concrete actions you can take to protect vulnerable Orange residents:

1. Establish and communicate a clear policy that local police and government agents will not enforce Federal immigration law.
2. Establish strong anti-discrimination policies and privacy protections to protect vulnerable communities, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, and many other identities that require protections under the law.
3. Adopt strong policies ensuring that city agents and employees will treat all individuals fairly without discrimination based on actual or perceived immigration status.
4. Adopt protocols for U-Visa certification for crime victims by local law enforcement.
5. Create a Municipal ID program, available to all City residents and recognized by all city agencies and departments, with strong privacy and data security protections as enacted by other NJ cities.
6. Commit City funding to support vital resources for immigrant communities, such as legal representation, citizenship services, and English classes.
7. Establish an ongoing mechanism for stakeholder engagement around implementation of anti-discrimination and privacy policies and response to initiatives that threaten our values.

We look forward to continuing to work with you to adopt and implement these policies. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions to Charlie Wirene, Managing Director of The HUUB, at OrangeHUUB@gmail.com or 973-674-0010. We will follow up shortly to schedule a meeting to discuss working together to make our City safer for all.

If you live or work or own a business in the City of Orange, and you wish to add your signature to the statement above, please send a message, with the subject line "Signature," to: . Please include your full name and your Zip Code. You may also include your affiliation and your phone number. Please Note: Your name (and affiliation if provided) will be displayed on this webpage after a delay of a day or so. Your contact information will not be displayed with your signature.