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SALT LAKE CITY — Recent hate crimes and upcoming immigration raids have prompted anxiety among Salt Lake County’s Hispanic and immigrant communities.
In response to rising concerns, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill held a meeting with Utah’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on Thursday evening. During the discussion, Gill addressed several topics, from hate crimes to immigration raids.
Concerns over hate crimes arose due to a hate crime against Luis Lopez and his father in a tire shop last December, according to Gill. In response to that incident, the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office pushed to pass hate crime statutes correcting past weakness in the law.
“Looking back over the past 20-25 years, there has not been a successful hate crime prosecution in the state of Utah at the local level because we did not have a hate crime statute,” Gill told KSL.com. “All hate crime prosecutions that ever happened in the state of Utah were the result of federal prosecution, not by state attorneys.”
The old law made it very hard to convict for hate crimes at all, according to Gill. Additionally, it only allowed for the conviction of misdemeanors and nothing more serious.
“The new statute gives us a workable tool, under which we don’t have to meet the same unenforceable burden that the old statute had,” Gill said. “It allows us to enhance both the misdemeanor offenses and apply a sentencing structure to enforce conduct.”
Thursday’s meeting was primarily intended to help educate the public about the new hate crime statute and what its implications are, according to Gill. Nonetheless, it took a turn when impending immigration raids came into discussion.
Nationwide raids to arrest undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are scheduled to begin on Sunday, according to the New York Times. Some “collateral” deportations may occur, and in these deportations, some immigrants on scene may be detained even if they are not the raid’s targets.
Family members who are taken into custody together will be held in Texas and Pennsylvania at detention centers, according to the New York Times. ICE’s goal is to deport them as quickly as possible.
The operation will occur in 10 major cities and at least 2,000 immigrants have been ordered deported, the New York Times said. Though Salt Lake City is not expected to be included in this weekend’s raids, immigrant communities in the area are rattled, Gill said.
“There was a genuine, palpable concern about immigration,” Gill said about Thursday’s meeting. He added, “At least the sense that I got was (that) there is genuine fear and concern that there is going to be this blanket rounding up indiscriminately and they are concerned about the due process of law. They are (concerned they are) just going to be gathered up in some unjust and inhumane way. Those are genuine fears for our community.”
The Trump administration’s goal is to show force through the operation in an attempt to deter more families from entering the United States through the southwestern border, according to the New York Times. President Donald Trump said in a tweet that he believes the operation will result in a quick end to the border crisis.
Vice President Mike Pence added in a tweet that he has seen U.S. Customs and Border Protection providing “humane and compassionate care” to immigrants. Still, the Utah immigrant community is fearful of what could happen, according to Gill.
“People are not sure whether their family might be separated or whether people might be affected by the detentions,” Luis Garza, executive director of Comunidades Unidas, told KSL TV. “It is possible for us to build bridges instead of building walls.”
Garza acknowledged that the list does not appear to include any cities in Utah, but told KSL TV that “there’s always a concern in terms of the current operations or expansion of operations of ICE here in Utah.”
Gill hopes that their work to prevent and punish hate crimes will help to build those bridges in the Hispanic community, according to KSL TV.
“It’s great that we were able to pass this legislation,” Gill concluded. “But in the broader issue of immigration, I think we as a nation and as a community can do better. Our institutional failures should not be a justification to institute fear in marginalized communities which are simply here to fill an economic gap we have created.”
Read more about the immigration raids in the New York Times.
