‘You’re fighting for a neighbor,’ Collingswood mayor says at rally against border separations

A heated late-afternoon rally in Collingswood against border separations turned personal Monday when the mayor shared that an immigrant resident living in the town for 18 years had recently been detained and could face deportation.

"You're fighting for a neighbor," Mayor Jim Maley told the crowd of 200 protesters wielding signs outside of Grooveground, a coffee shop at 647 Haddon Ave.

Last Wednesday, he said, a Collingswood man went for his periodic check-in at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. That same day, he was detained in a Newark jail and could now face deportation, the mayor said.

The man, whose name Maley declined to share, is an immigrant from Macedonia who has a wife and three children in elementary school. At the man's check-in last week, Maley said the man was detained because "there was a different ICE agent."

"This person has … here for a long, long time," the mayor said in an interview. "He has three kids that were all born here and involved in our recreation programs in our schools," Maley said.

He said he did not know why the man was checking in with ICE.

Maley said the government filed paperwork on Friday to expedite the deportation process. The town made phone calls to federal officials, including  U.S.Sen. Cory Booker, U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross, and U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez's office, hoping to pressure ICE in Newark to reconsider the man's deportation.

The man's family, he said, is under stress because "time is of the essence."

"We're pulling out all the stops to see what we can do," Maley said. "We're just trying to enlist as much political pressure as we can to get a reconsideration … They're going through records to see what they can find to put a hold on the process."

The rally comes after President Trump signed an executive order last week to halt his administration's policy of family separations at the U.S.- Mexican border.

Those in the crowd expressed outrage at U.S. Attorney General Jeff Session's "zero-tolerance" policy, which prosecutes everyone who crosses the border illegally.

Collingswood resident Judith Levine said she was "completely outraged" when she saw photos of the immigrant detention centers for children.

"I was enraged. I had tears in my eyes," she said. "To think that any child would be separated from their parent is the cruelest thing you could do to anyone."

Religious leaders took the microphone to decry the detention centers across a number of states and called the policy "xenophobic and hateful."

Over the past several months, more than 2,300 children have been separated from their families.

"It seems to get worse each and every day," said Rev. Ryan Paetzold, pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Audubon. "Those today who are fleeing violence, who are fleeing war … hoping to make a better life for themselves, they are struggling very much."