L.A. City Council proposes new measures to protect immigrants from Trump
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The Los Angeles City Council will consider a series of proposals intended to protect immigrants from President Trump’s planned crackdowns.
Among the five proposals introduced Tuesday by Hugo Soto-Martínez and other City Council members is one that could require businesses to report federal workplace immigration enforcement actions, including raids and audits, to the city.
One proposal calls for a “know your rights” campaign to inform L.A. residents about immigration protections, and a third would provide space at LAX for nonprofit legal service providers to prepare for a ban on visitors from several predominantly Muslim countries, similar to the one Trump implemented in 2017 and which he has vowed to restore during his second term.
Advancing the measures would double down on the city’s immigrant-friendly policies, even in the face of Trump’s threats to withhold federal funds, including relief money Los Angeles needs to recover from last month’s devastating wildfires.
L.A. County needs federal aid. But the supervisors also want to protect immigrants from a Trump crackdown. Will one win out?
The proposals direct city officials to identify $540,000 to provide three months of funding for immigration legal service providers whose federal support has been frozen by the Trump administration. They also call on the city to sponsor and support state legislation to increase funding for legal representation and advocacy for immigrants facing deportation.
“This legislation sends a clear message: Los Angeles will not be complicit in Trump’s dehumanizing agenda,” said Soto-Martínez, a proponent of L.A.’s sanctuary city law who chairs the council committee on immigration, equity and civil rights. “We will fight back and protect our community.”
Soto-Martínez said that collecting information from employers on immigration raids and audits “will give us an understanding of what they’re doing, the businesses they’re targeting, what areas are they going through” and help the city respond with legal resources to protect residents.
The Trump administration has vowed to target Los Angeles, Chicago and other Democrat-controlled cities with raids and mass deportations and has threatened to punish them if they refuse to cooperate with the president’s anti-immigrant agenda.
The proposals come after Mayor Karen Bass in December signed a sanctuary city law that prohibits city employees and resources from being involved in federal immigration enforcement, enshrining policies established by her predecessor, Eric Garcetti.
Tuesday’s legislation, which needs to clear the immigration, equity and civil rights committee before going to the full council for a vote, is bound to face questions and potential changes.
City Councilmember John Lee would like to see amendments to exclude participation for people convicted of violent crimes, spokesperson Roger Quintanilla said.
“He would like to hear more and better understand what impacts these items will have on our city and resources,” Quintanilla said.
Trump’s order to cut off funding to sanctuary cities could threaten L.A. fire relief
The move to ramp up the city’s response follows days of protests against Trump’s immigration policies, including a rally in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday where thousands shut down the 101 Freeway, and a “day without immigrants” protest Monday, with people across Southern California and the nation closing businesses, skipping school or work and refraining from shopping. Demonstrators gathered in downtown L.A. again Tuesday, including high school students who walked out of class.
Soto-Martínez announced the legislation at a rally outside City Hall on Tuesday alongside Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Imelda Padilla and Ysabel Jurado, who, like him, were born to immigrant parents. Behind them stood members of immigrant rights and labor groups who have urged the city to stand up to Trump and enact policies that deliver on the promise of its sanctuary city ordinance.
“Los Angeles is a city of immigrants, and we won’t stand [by] as a backward administration tries to dismantle the very things that make our city great,” Hernandez said. “We must do more if we are serious about being a sanctuary city.”
Martha Arévalo, executive director of the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, an immigrant rights group, welcomed the legislation as a way to strengthen the city’s social safety net, protect residents and set a model for other communities confronting Trump’s immigration policies.
“This administration and its supporters believe that in order for white supremacy and for an unfair economic system to continue, they have to blame, they have to terrorize the most vulnerable immigrant children and families and people living in poverty,” Arévalo said. “But are we going to let them? No. Los Angeles is, and must remain, a safe city for all immigrant communities.”
Since starting his second term, Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders targeting immigrants and “sanctuary cities,” many of them on his first day in office.
One of Trump’s first-day orders directed federal officials to cut off funds for sanctuary cities and other jurisdictions that do not cooperate with immigration enforcement, jeopardizing wildfire relief money for Los Angeles.
The Justice Department has also directed federal prosecutors to investigate state or local officials who stand in the way of the president’s immigration enforcement plans. And Trump’s new Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, issued an order last week threatening to withhold transportation funding from sanctuary jurisdictions.
Trump, who has a long history of racism and xenophobia and launched his first presidential campaign by labeling Mexican migrants as “rapists,” has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promised “the largest deportation operation in American history” in his second term.
The California Legislature approved bills to provide $25 million for lawsuits against the Trump administration and $25 million largely to support immigrants.
Public support for immigrants remains strong in California, which has more immigrants than any other state. Immigrant communities are concentrated in big, blue counties like Los Angeles, where Kamala Harris got more than twice as many votes as Trump in November.
More than 60% of L.A. County’s 10 million residents are either foreign-born or have at least one immigrant parent, and about 800,000 people in the county lacked legal status in 2023, according to the USC Equity Research Institute.
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