The Mexican consul general was chatting with illegal day laborers in Yonkers on Monday morning — until the group was threatened with arrest for trespassing and chased off a private parking lot.
Consul General Diego Gomez Pickering was forced to change venues for the meeting, which reporters were invited to, after the gas station on Yonkers Avenue gave him and the nearly two dozen workers the boot. Immigrants line up daily in the lot to try to get work.
The group moved across the street to a Planet Fitness parking lot, but they soon found out they weren’t welcome there, either.
“You can’t be here, we’re calling the police. You’re trespassing!” one of the Planet Fitness gym rats yelled at the crowd halfway through the 15-minute meeting.
When Pickering said they’d only be another minute, a Planet Fitness worker yelled back, “Not a minute – you’re going to get arrested. You’re leaving now!”
One cop car showed up, but by then, the group had dispersed.
Pickering organized the meeting to talk about immigration issues, including deportation concerns in wake of President Trump’s election.
“The immigrant community is concerned because New York has traditionally been one of the places, on a state and local level, providing a safe place to live and work. They feel unsafe now,” Pickering said. “We are working with organizations like Catholic Charities because they have traditionally been against the policies that lead to the separation of families.”
Esmeralda Hoscoy, the regional supervisor at Catholic Charities, said immigrants have been flooding hotlines and rushing to become naturalized citizens.
“They are asking questions like, ‘Can I send my kids to school?’ They are asking about how to become a citizen,” she said. “They want to know what it all means. We’re trying to be informative as possible.”
Additional reporting by Lia Eustachewich
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
