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 to be 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.
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,” Soto-Martínez said in a statement. “We will fight back and protect our community.”
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.
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.
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.
Soto-Martínez, a proponent of L.A.’s sanctuary city law who chairs the council committee on immigration, equity and civil rights, said his parents were undocumented and “built a life here without the constant fear that a trip to work or taking me to school could tear our family apart.”
“Every Angeleno deserves that same safety and dignity,” he said.
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.