Alan Weber, a vocal critic of Woodstock’s town government, has removed himself from a human-rights resolution he himself had proposed, claiming references to immigrants were removed.
In response to the Trump administration, Weber had proposed a human-rights resolution to protect those most vulnerable, including LGBTQ+ and undocumented immigrants. He accused councilmember Laura Ricci of removing references to immigrants from a version of a resolution to be approved by the town board.
“I negotiated with her in good faith, making several changes more than I personally would have liked in an attempt to overcome her concern about potentially disobeying the law by the town’s refusing to cooperate with immigration police,” Weber said. “I thought we had made progress. Now it has come to my attention that she decided to just drop any mention of immigrants entirely from the resolution — which otherwise remains, in my exact words, ‘clearly the two most immediately threatened groups are the trans and immigrant populations.’”
He said Ricci was uncomfortable with the section on immigrants. He termed exempting immigrants from the specific umbrella of populations whose human rights Woodstock supports “is an act of moral cowardice.”
Councilmember Anula Courtis, former chair of the town’s Human Rights Commission, said she had been working on a human-rights document with Ricci that incorporated some of what Weber proposed.
“We want to be very careful in talking about reproductive rights and address it in a more aligned manner with the state. So if the state should update the reproductive section of their human rights laws, we automatically will be updated with them. And we also want to align ourselves with the United Nations,” Courtis said. “We want something that is going to be updated, that is going to keep us modern, and something that I think of it as a living document.”
Ricci said it was Courtis’ idea to incorporate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. “I really appreciate Anula’s idea that says let’s tie in with what’s already there federally,” Ricci said. “Let’s tie in with what’s already there by the state. And so we’re still doing the thinking of what’s already there and what do we need to add.”
In 2017, the town passed a human-rights resolution. The commission worked with the police department to limit its cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The town police will only cooperate with a directive signed by a judge that has a suspect’s name.
The town, however, has no power over other law-enforcement agencies and cannot prevent ICE or other immigration authorities from carrying out their duties.
Recently, the Trump justice department ordered investigations of state and city law-enforcement officials who refuse to carry out the administration’s immigration-policy directives.
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