Santa Fe Mayor David Coss is a staunch supporter of immigrant rights, as is much of Santa Fe and New Mexico’s population. The state is one of only a handful that still permits undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license and a state law makes undocumented students eligible for instate tuition and financial aid, a luxury they are not afforded by 40 other states.

Yet, just prior to the arrest described above, as part of its “Return To Sender” initiative ICE arrested 30 undocumented immigrants in Santa Fe. Unlike other raids that have involved local police (and still been botched), both Mayor Coss and Santa Fe’s police chief were unaware of ICE’s plans. As Coss told The Santa Fe New Mexican:

We're just a little displeased that such a major operation would take place without our chief of police being informed...

Schoolchildren – and school administrators – were shaken:

School Superintendent Leslie Carpenter said she was concerned about the arrests' emotional toll on students. “Students were receiving calls that their family members were affected by this. They were asking to leave school to investigate. We had young adults at our high schools crying and trying to figure out what was going on.”

After the arrest at Chaparral Elementary and the “Return To Sender” apprehensions, Santa Fe instituted a safe-schools policy that limits investigation of and arrests related to immigration matters on and near school grounds.

At the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors earlier this year, Mayor Coss told MayorTV:

If children are concerned that when their parents are picking them up from school they might be arrested and deported, then you just lose functionality. And we’ve seen that a few times in our school system in Santa Fe. We had, last year, an arrest of a Dad on trumped-up charges in front of his kids, in front of the teachers. And that only has to happen a few times before it’s very, very hard for our young people to get an education and be involved in class. ... I wish in the United States of America I wasn’t working on this issue.

At the mayors' annual meeting, Mayor Coss introduced and steered to adoption as Conference policy a resolution calling on the federal government to pass comprehensive immigration reform. In addition, the resolution demands that the President:

cease and desist in the execution of all raids and deportations that do not relate to our national security or to criminal activity until comprehensive immigration reform is completed and...suspend immediately all deportations of parents with U.S. citizen children...

But Mayor Coss does not simply lament the federal government’s “abysmal failure to lead and act on immigration reform”. He also has an explanation for the inaction:

We know what the right thing to do is. We have political leadership that wants to keep us from doing [the right thing] because the division works for them. But it doesn’t work for us. And most people know that.

Here, Mayor Coss identifies a crucial issue missing from the immigration debate, one which has the potential to calm the heated – and at times hateful – rhetoric used by immigration critics, while clarifying the benefits and challenges that can come with immigration reform.

The longer the political leadership is able to use immigration raids as a proxy for actual immigration reform, the longer elites will benefit from the economic contributions of immigrants while immigrants themselves – and American workers whose working conditions and wages are undermined – suffer. Just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are paradigms of that newestcliché “heads you win, tails we lose”, enforcement-only immigration tactics work for political leadership who look like their doing something, while the rest of us – documented and undocumented immigrants, naturalized citizens, native-born citizens, whomever – are losing the valuable contributions that immigrants with a pathway to citizenship have to offer.

That said, the people who suffer most from immigration raids are indeed those rounded up by cowboy ICE agents and their families who are left wondering what has become of their daughters, fathers, mothers, and brothers. Don’t believe me? These stories tell a pretty compelling tale.

You can see MayorTV's entire interview with Mayor Coss at here.