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2016–2020
In December 2016 La Casa de Amistad, the city's Latino advocacy organization, unveiled the Community Resident Card — the "SB ID" — an identification card for residents, including undocumented immigrants, who could not obtain state identification. The city's part was formal: the Common Council had budgeted $18,000 toward the program in 2016, and Mayor Buttigieg's Executive Order 02-2016 directed city agencies — police, schools, the water utility, libraries — to accept the card as valid identification. The contested choice was structural. On legal advice the card was issued by the nonprofit rather than the city, and La Casa's executive director, Sam Centellas, explained why in public: if a public body issued the cards, cardholder records might be disclosable under Indiana's Access to Public Records Act, exposing the very people the card was meant to protect. Supporters called the design a safeguard; critics called it secrecy by construction — a public program arranged so that the public's records law could not reach it.
The dispute reached court in 2019. Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog organization, made a series of public-records requests in June and July 2019 for emails between the mayor, his staff, and La Casa officials about the program's creation. The city refused them as not reasonably particular; after four exchanges it produced the executive order and two information bulletins that were already public. Judicial Watch sued in August 2019 under the Access to Public Records Act. The litigation's sharpest moment concerned the former mayor's own accounts: Judicial Watch moved to depose Buttigieg, by then a former mayor, over whether official business had been done on personal email. The fight ended in a court order of November 20, 2020 (Judicial Watch v. City of South Bend, No. 71D06-1908-MI-000389, St. Joseph Superior Court): the deposition notice was withdrawn, and Buttigieg submitted instead to a subpoena requiring him to search his personal email accounts for Community Resident Card messages from July 2016 through June 2017 and produce what the search found. He did so, and Judicial Watch announced the outcome as a victory for transparency. The court record supports the narrower statement: the program's design survived, the secrecy charge was answered with a court-ordered search of a former mayor's private inbox, and the card itself — which both major-party nominees in the 2019 mayoral election had pledged to keep — continued.
Sources:
- City of South Bend, Executive Order No. 02-2016
- South Bend Tribune, December 16, 2016 (card unveiled); Jeff Parrott, "Conservative group Judicial Watch sues South Bend over immigrant ID card records," August 9, 2019
- Judicial Watch v. City of South Bend, No. 71D06-1908-MI-000389 (St. Joseph Superior Court), order of November 20, 2020
- Judicial Watch, announcement of the email-search agreement and court order, December 2020