This morning dozens of community members along with several elected officials held a press conference with Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition to encourage the Mayor and Police Chief to reject participation in a federal immigrant tracking program called "Secure Communities."

The program would require police officers to contact ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement which is solely responsible for detention and deportation in immigration matters) as soon as individuals were booked through a federal fingerprinting process. This program is the most recent in a series of ICE programs that make local police the contact point between immigrants and ICE agents.

In other cities, the program has led to serious concerns around selective enforcement and racial profiling, expensive re-direction of personnel resources, and an increase in detention.

This morning, City Council is expected to pass two bills that will re-zone the Gallery to a gambling district (CED), and re-designate an area from 6th to Broad Streets and Arch to Chestnut Streets as an area where a gambling zone "would be permissible."

For one of the City’s biggest projects, this could likely be the most fast-tracked in history. No plans, no proposals, no studies, and worse no questions. A Saturday Council hearing on November 1st saw up to 1,000 people in the streets, five hours of testimony from 60 speakers, and not a single question or dialogue among Council members before they unanimously voted it out of committee – adding a caveat that the rules would be suspended to set a special Nov. 6th hearing for first reading and that the Nov. 13th hearing would allow both a second reading and a vote on the same day.

City officials are silencing questions and asking Philadelphians to take a wait and see approach. But last month Mayoral advisor Terry Gillen gave a videotaped talk at the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association that gives troubling insight into the zoning legislation and what really is at stake – and perhaps, most troubling of all, the active role the administration might have as Foxwoods’ potential business partner in the Market East location.

It’s a long meeting (you can see the full video below), so I’ll help break it up for you:

First, the CED legislation is NOT exploratory in nature:

Contrary to city officials claiming that the CED legislation would only allow them to "explore" the Market East site, Gillen speaks candidly that the City and Foxwoods and the PA Gaming Control Board (PGCB) have an understanding that the CED could form the basis for a site license change – a process she said no one had done before and that city officials were "making up." She also implies how premeditated this is because they want things to happen before there's any possibility of the election impacting on the PGCB's make-up.