Immigrant advocates stood on the steps of the Connecticut capitol on Monday and vowed to protect their communities under a second Trump administration, in light of stated plans from President-elect Donald Trump to carry out mass deportations.
“It is the policy and it is the law of the state of Connecticut to respect, honor and protect immigrants and immigrant families here in Connecticut. Full stop,” said Attorney General William Tong.
Tong didn’t offer details on the specific legal actions the state might take to ensure the safety of those communities, and he said the future remains uncertain.
“I don’t think anybody knows when and how and where they’re gonna hit us and how, frankly, this is going to go down. But we know they’re coming and we know that it’s at the top of their list,” he said.
Going back as far as his 2016 presidential bid, Trump has made extreme claims about immigration enforcement, including promising to construct a border wall that he said would run from coast to coast and be funded by Mexico’s government. Though Trump added to existing border wall infrastructure, Mexico did not pay for those projects, and the coast-to-coast pledge went unfulfilled.
But Trump did enact other hardline immigration policies during his first term. He made it more difficult for asylum seekers to pursue their legal cases, and he separated children from their parents.
Going into 2025, Trump has pledged to enact far stricter policies, including a mass deportation program to “get the criminals out.” During his most recent presidential campaign, he also pledged to end birthright citizenship.
Connecticut has previously taken steps to protect immigrants, including the 2019 ‘Trust Act,’ which limits when state law enforcement are allowed to hold people in custody who are being pursued by federal immigration officials.
Tong said on Monday that the Trust Act puts the onus of immigration enforcement on federal authorities. “That’s their job, it’s not our job,” Tong said. “So the federal government can’t come into Connecticut and commandeer state resources — state law enforcement — to do their job for them.”
Connecticut has also taken steps to provide state-sponsored Medicaid-like coverage for children 15 and under who meet the income eligibility, regardless of immigration status. Kids enrolled in the program can keep coverage until they turn 19.
Expansion of the program has occurred in phases, which often frustrated supporters. The legislature originally passed a law extending coverage to children 8 and under in 2021, and then expanded the program to include children 12 and under in 2022. That coverage began on Jan. 1, 2023, and then extended to children 13 to 15 in July 2024.
Democratic state leadership committed earlier this year to push for expanding the eligibility age beyond 15.
But Republican leadership in Connecticut has criticized that program. House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora and Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding recently called for an end to the program amidst cost overruns in the Medicaid program.
“If the Governor is serious about financial stability, we have to suspend this policy now to stop the bleeding,” said House Republican leadership said in a press release.
Such a change would require legislative approval, said Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, via text message.
“It’s sad seeing Connecticut’s Republican legislators trying to remake themselves into MAGA ultra-Trumpers when almost all of them voted to provide health care for undocumented children, many of them more than once,” Lesser said in a press release.
Fereshteh Ganjavi, an immigrant from Afghanistan, said that Connecticut has been, and can remain, a leader among states in supporting immigrants.
“Connecticut gave us the chance to rebuild our lives, and I want the same for every refugee and immigrant who comes here, by continuing to invest in programs that support education, health care and workforce development for immigrants,” Ganjavi said.
Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, himself a son of Sri Lankan immigrants, said the city is on track to have its safest year in two decades thanks to violence prevention initiatives, and pouring resources into immigration raids would not help that effort. “We’ve done things the right way to keep our communities safe. We know what we’re doing,” he said. “Going after hard working immigrants in our communities is not what keeps us safe, it’s not going to lead to safer communities. It’s going to lead to more fear and uncertainty.”
Like many of the speakers on Monday, Tong said the issue is deeply personal to him as well. He pointed to a brick apartment building at 600 Asylum Ave., within sight of the capitol steps, where his mother lived when she first arrived in Hartford from Taiwan. Tong, who was the first U.S. citizen in his family, said his father was nearly deported shortly before he was born.
“My dad, like a lot of people, had a complicated immigration history,” Tong said. “If this happened today people would call him undocumented, they would say he’s illegal. And still to this day I know in my heart there’s nothing illegal about what my father did, about what my parents did, about what they hoped for me and my sisters and our family.”