Home > Our Blog > Steve Levy’s Role-A Closer Look at Suffolk Hate Crimes Pt. 3

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Steve Levy’s Role-A Closer Look at Suffolk Hate Crimes Pt. 3

Posted September 5, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

This is the third installment of a four part series looking at the rash of anti-Latino hate crimes described in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report Climate of Fear. For Part 1 which examines the report’s conclusions, or Part 2 which details the patters of hate crimes, click on the link.
When Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy has addressed the murder of Marcelo Lucero in the past, he has called the seven young men accused of the attack “white supremacists”. He has compared them to the Nazis. He has blamed their parents. He has blamed their teachers. He has blamed their friends.
Levy has been quite profligate in his accusations, but he has never turned the finger of responsibility upon himself.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) does what we have been waiting these last ten months for Steve Levy to do.
When is come to anti-Latino hatred in Suffolk, the SPLC says, Levy is the Enabler in Chief. Here is the SPLC’s indictment:
As misguided young men have engaged in violent attacks on Latino immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y., some local politicians on the sidelines have been playing the role of cheerleaders. Far from acting as peacemakers, they have fed the atmosphere of hostility with rhetorical attacks of their own.
County Executive Steve Levy isn’t the only public official engaging in the verbal immigrant-bashing, or the most extreme. But he is the highest-ranking, and since he was elected to his first term in November 2003 after promising a crackdown on illegal immigrants, Levy has been acting like the enabler-in-chief.
Soon after taking office, Levy proposed that Suffolk County police officers be empowered to detain Latinos solely on suspicion of being undocumented immigrants and turn them over to federal authorities for deportation. Police unions blocked the proposal, arguing that it would compromise public safety by making immigrants all the more wary of providing information about criminal activity.
In June 2005, Levy oversaw zoning violation raids on 11 houses in Farmingville and the eviction of 200 Latino day laborers and their family members. He then refused to meet with immigrant-rights advocates. “I’m not one who’s going to be intimidated by their antics or marches,” he said. “Bring it on.”
Later the same month, Levy mocked demonstrators who protested the raids. “I will not back down to this one percent lunatic fringe,” he said. “They evidently do not like me much because I am one of the few officials who are not intimidated by their politically correct histrionics.”
Full disclosure here: I, along with Rev. Ramirez, was specifically named by Levy in a follow-up quote as part of the lunatic fringe. Having already been described by Levy’s supporters as a “traitor” and a “terrorist sympathizer”, I suppose Levy’s characterization actually represented a moderation of tone.
Then there is Levy’s infamous description of Latinos born in the U.S. as less than real citizens:
At a forum in 2006, he said that women crossing the border to give birth in the United States “free of charge” were having “anchor babies,” and he asserted that Southampton Hospital was on the verge of closing its maternity ward because of the births. The ward remained open.
Levy later expanded out from his early association with local anti-immigrant radicals like The Minutemen and the Sachem Quality of Life, to work nationally with hate organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR):
Levy co-founded Mayors and Executives for Immigration Reform, a national group that promotes immigrant-cleansing ordinances. He described critics of the organization as “Communists” and “anarchists.”
And Levy’s behavior in the weeks following the murder of Marcelo Lucero, his behavior showed the same lack of sensitivity to the value of a Latino’s life:
In the days after the Nov. 8, 2008, slaying of Marcelo Lucero, Levy at first minimized the significance of the hate-crime murder. Had it happened elsewhere, he said, it would have been just a “one-day story.”
That comment outraged Latinos and Suffolk County activists, among others, and Levy backpedaled. He apologized about a week later.
But Levy also denied any link between Lucero’s death and his administration’s targeting of undocumented Latino immigrants. “Advocates for those here illegally should not disparage those opposed to the illegal immigration policy as being bigoted or intolerant,” he said.
It wasn’t long before Levy was back to making flippant comments about Lucero’s murder. While speaking to a gathering of business people, he compared the difficulties he was having in dealing with the fallout of the killing to the discomfort of undergoing a colonoscopy.

This was around the same time that he dismissed me as an “illegal immigration” advocate who could be expected to criticize the county’s poor record on protecting its Latino resident’s. Actually I was trying to warn him that he needed to act to halt the tide of hate attacks. But slamming his critics is a lot easier than listening to them.