Supporters of immigrants’ rights called a march and rally in Danbury for September 30 to protest the arrests and demand that the federal and city governments stop such sting operations and other workplace immigration raids.

The workers were arrested while waiting for jobs in a street near Kennedy Park, the Danbury News-Times reported. That’s a spot where dozens of day laborers, in their majority immigrants from Latin America, gather every day to await for contractors to hire them.

According to local media, the immigration cops approached the group of workers standing at Kennedy Park around 6:30 a.m., wearing work helmets, carrying tools in the back of a van, and pretending to look for laborers to build a fence. Thinking that they had been hired to do the job, the workers boarded the van and were then taken to a nearby street where other immigration cops were waiting.

The cops went back to entrap more workers using different cars and agents, workers told the local Spanish-language weekly El Canillita.

“They did it early in the morning, when no one can see them,” María Cinta Lowe, executive director of the Hispanic Center of Greater Danbury, told El Canillita. “They come like thieves, hiding, to take these people.”

José Andrade, 29, is a roofer from Ecuador. He has been living in Danbury, a city of 78,000 in southwest Connecticut, since he was six years old. He told El Canillita he went to Kennedy Park more than an hour after the sting operation started. He later saw the name of one of his friends on the list of those arrested. “We are here because we need to work,” he said. “Now it’s harder to trust anybody. I don’t know when I go into a restaurant if the waiter suddenly turns out to be from immigration and they arrest me.”

The 11 workers, all Ecuadoran-born, are being held in immigration jails in Massachusetts and are facing deportation proceedings.

The raid was carried out with the help of the Danbury police, which called la migra, after supposedly receiving complaints from residents that day laborers were obstructing traffic.

In the last two months local cops have stepped up patrols near the park. Police chief Al Baker told the News-Times that officers on bicycles usually begin watching the area around 6:00 a.m.

“In my opinion, if they are looking for criminals, or terrorists, since that is what they always say, I don’t think Kennedy Park is the best place to do that, since the people that go there are only looking for work,” said Lowe.

Organizations supporting the struggle to legalize all immigrants and other groups have called a September 30 acton to protest the arrests. Demonstrators will assemble at Kennedy Park at 12:30 p.m., organizers said, and will march to City Hall, where they will hold a picket line at 2:00 p.m.

“We will demand that they stop the raids, stop intimidating us, and we will tell them that we are here to stay,” Franklyn Peña, president of the Ecuadoran Civic Center in Danbury, told the New York Spanish-language daily Hoy.
 
 
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