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Most people still assume a badge in this state comes with an American passport. It doesn’t.
Connecticut’s Police Officer Standards and Training Council dropped the citizenship requirement for green-card holders in 2020. In March 2025 it opened certification to DACA recipients. Towns can still require citizenship, but Danbury’s mayor has been pushing the city to drop its citizenship rule. As of late August 2026, that amendment had gone to committee and a public-hearing referral. It has not shown up as adopted at this time.
The Danbury Republican Town Committee posted to Facebook: “You don’t have to be a U.S. citizen to police U.S. citizens.”
That is where Roberto Alves and the Danbury Democrats want to take the city. They have backed sanctuary-style limits on local cooperation with ICE. They have publicly attacked federal immigration enforcement operations in Danbury. Now they want the city ordinance changed so lawful permanent residents and DACA recipients can be eligible for a Danbury badge — police powers and the authority to arrest American citizens. Requiring citizenship is not an unreasonable standard.
A police officer is not a clerk at the DMV. The job is a grant of the state’s monopoly on force: guns, cuffs, entry into homes, the power to take someone’s liberty before a judge ever sees the file. The people who hold that power should owe undivided allegiance to the country whose laws they enforce. Citizenship is how that allegiance is formalized. A green card is permission to live and work here. DACA is a temporary, revocable deferral of removal. They are not the same thing.
A green-card holder has lawful permanent status and may generally own a firearm. A DACA recipient does not have lawful status and generally may not. That gun rule should settle the DACA argument. ATF has read a narrow exception for duty weapons issued by a department. Connecticut can therefore put a DACA officer on the street with a state-issued pistol while that same person may not lawfully keep a gun at home: armed as an agent of the state, restricted as a private person, and dependent on a federal program that courts and administrations have spent a decade trying to kill or revive.
Then there is the Trust Act, treated in Hartford as a moral achievement and, in practice, a limit on removing people who entered or remained in violation of federal immigration law. The same political class that weakens enforcement rarely admits the labor and housing effects of that choice. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it about illegal immigration and the labor market: “When you take the illegals out of the workforce, working class wages GO UP... when you send them back home, rents GO DOWN.”
Defenders will say the Danbury proposal is only about green-card holders and Dreamers, not anyone here illegally. Grant that. But the underlying question is still the same: should the minimum qualification to exercise the state’s power of arrest over American citizens be citizenship, or something less?
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