noncitizen

It was a traumatic moment for much of Southern California, as federal immigration agents snatched undocumented workers from car washes, garment factories and Home Depot parking lots.

Angelica Salas, who heads one of Los Angeles’ most influential immigrant rights groups, met regularly last summer with City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez — himself the son of Mexican immigrants — as they formulated a response. The two kept circling back to a singular issue: the lack of political power wielded by noncitizens.

“A lot of this is happening because immigrants don’t have the right to vote,” said Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Those conversations helped fuel Soto-Martínez’s decision in late April to push for a ballot proposal aimed at giving noncitizens the right to vote in city and school district elections. The proposal quickly gained momentum, with two-thirds of the council voting in mid-June to draft a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot.

Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martínez attends a City Council meeting following elections at City Hall June 3.

(Etienne Laurent / For the Times)

But the effort collapsed on Tuesday, with the council reversing course and sending the proposal to a committee for more study. Before the vote, Soto-Martínez acknowledged that he had not performed sufficient outreach, particularly to the city’s Black community leaders.

By then, critics were accusing the council of failing to do its homework, leaving voters to fill in the blanks on such questions as whether undocumented immigrants would be covered by the expanded franchise. Some worried the proposal would endanger the very people it was designed to help, making them a fresh target for the Trump administration.

Even community leaders who have worked on civil rights issues were urging the council to slow down.

Mobilizing Preachers and Communities, a national nonprofit that represents clergy and civil rights advocates, asked for a delay, citing concerns about President Trump. Rev. K.W. Tulloss, the group’s western regional director, said he was also hearing concerns from Black residents and their religious leaders about the potential for weakening Black voting representation.

That, in turn, could reduce the overall number of Black elected officials in Los Angeles, he said.

“That’s a major concern among our community,” Tulloss said. “And we can’t be afraid to have that dialogue.”

In L.A., Black residents make up about 8% of registered voters, according to the Sacramento-based firm Political Data, Inc. That figure has been gradually declining over the past few decades. An influx of noncitizen voters — Latinos, Asians and others — could cause it to shrink even more.

At the end of the year, L.A.’s 15-member City Council will have two Black representatives, down from three, all in South L.A.-based districts. Two Latinos are running in this year’s election to replace Councilmember Curren Price, who is Black and retiring after serving the maximum three terms.

The county’s five-member Board of Supervisors has one Black member. Voters have given the go-ahead to add four more members, which some fear could leave the board with one Black member out of nine.

Tulloss said his organization supports creating a pathway to citizenship for the city’s undocumented immigrants. At the same time, he worried that Soto-Martínez’s proposal could in the short term divide Black and brown residents, who share a common struggle on a wide range of issues.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want any type of deal that will be divisive in the community,” he said.

Soto-Martínez, who represents an Echo Park-to-Hollywood district, said in an interview Wednesday that noncitizen voting was part of his platform when he first ran for City Council in 2022. He said he first thought about the issue seriously a decade ago, when San Francisco voters passed a measure allowing noncitizen parents to cast ballots in school board elections.

Since its formation, the United States has repeatedly redefined the right to vote, broadening it to include women, Black people and other groups, he said.

“To me, it just seemed very natural to expand it,” he said. “It’s part of our history.”

The idea of noncitizen voting has been circulating in L.A. for years. School board member Kelly Gonez persuaded her colleagues to begin exploring it in 2019. But the effort was set aside after the onset of COVID-19, which caused massive disruptions across the Los Angeles Unified School District, said Michael Trujillo, a political strategist for Gonez.

Last summer, as the Trump administration was launching immigration raids across Southern California, the city was convening a 13-member citizens commission to come up with proposals for rewriting the City Charter, L.A.’s governing document.

The commission took up noncitizen voting in March, narrowly rejecting it. Several commissioners said they were worried about unintended consequences, like the Trump administration taking aim at newly registered voters, said Raymond Meza, who served as the commission’s chair.

“I thought those concerns were not fully addressed,” Meza said, “so I actually switched my vote” and opposed the proposal.

A month later, with the deadline for placing items on the Nov. 3 ballot fast approaching, Soto-Martínez introduced a motion calling for a two-step process for expanding voting rights. First, voters would be asked to give the City Council the authority to grant noncitizens the right to vote.

The council would then examine the details surrounding the change before passing an ordinance expanding those voting rights.

Soto-Martínez said his motion was based on a simple idea: Those who live in the city, raise their families there and pay taxes “deserve to have a voice” in local decision-making. He did not offer many specifics, saying those would be worked out at a later date.

Critics, and even some supporters, said Soto-Martínez was making his move at the wrong time. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who voted against the proposal in mid-June, voiced fears that the list of noncitizen voters would immediately be seized by federal immigration authorities.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he opposes noncitizen voting in city elections. He does favor it for L.A. Unified — but only for parents of children attending those schools.

Villaraigosa, who led the city from 2005-13 and recently ran for governor, argued that this is not the right time to make even that change.

“With Trump ferreting through every record he can find looking for undocumented people, I just think it’s the wrong time,” he said. “I think these people would be exposing themselves to deportation, and the well-intentioned would be exposing them as well.”

Soto-Martínez portrayed such arguments as “fear mongering,” saying undocumented immigrants take risks every day in their quest to create a better future for their families.

Salas, the head of CHIRLA, echoed that idea.

“At end of day, we are already targets,” she said. “This is not going to make it worse. Don’t tell me voting against this was for the protection of immigrants.”

The Trump threat was not the only reason council members hesitated.

Rodriguez, who has expressed some interest in the proposal, said city leaders had not determined how county election officials would issue separate ballots for voters who would be barred from state and national contests. They also had not determined the cost of such a service, she said.

Twenty-two local jurisdictions across the country have approved and implemented noncitizen voting, according to Megan Dias, who is co-author of “Immigrant Voting and the Movement for Inclusion in San Francisco,” a report examining that city’s push to allow immigrants to vote in school board elections.

Dias said that backers of noncitizen voting need to build a broad coalition — grassroots organizations, election officials, lawyers for the city — before taking the proposal to voters.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he is confident that noncitizen voting will get a much more extensive review in the coming months, and make the ballot in 2028. First, he said, the council will need to provide voters with specifics on how the changes would work.

Harris-Dawson said he heard from people who wanted more time to understand the proposal, to “make sure that it was done in a way that protected Black voting districts in particular.”

During the deliberations on the proposal, it also was not clear whether the change would apply to green card holders, recipients of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals or other categories of noncitizens.

“When something goes to the ballot, we need the details to be figured out — like how much something is going to cost, exactly how it’s going to work, and what the parameters are,” Harris-Dawson said. “All of that needs to be defined.”

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to pull a measure from the Nov. 3 ballot that would have created a pathway to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

The council, on a unanimous vote, sent the draft ballot language to a committee for additional study after several councilmembers said it had not been properly vetted.

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez acknowledged that he had not done enough outreach on the proposal, and had received letters from members of the Black community voicing concerns.

“I grew up in South Central Los Angeles. The Black and Brown solidarity is deep to me, and means something to me, and I don’t want this to be something that gets pushed through that is seen as a negative, something negative for the city of Los Angeles,” he said.

Soto-Martínez said he would keep pursuing the proposal in a future election so that when it passes, the city can have a “big celebration.”

The noncitizen voting proposal was not the only one dropped by the council at the 11th hour.

In a separate vote, the council scrapped plans for a Nov. 3 ballot measure that would have given council members power over policy at the Los Angeles Police Department. The Board of Los Angeles Police Commissioners, whose members are appointed by the mayor, currently have that responsibility.

The council voted 8-6 to further study the ballot proposal after the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file members, threatened to sue the city, saying labor negotiators failed to meet and confer with them over the proposal.

The plan for expanding voting rights for noncitizens was unveiled by Soto-Martínez two months ago, It would have authorized the City Council to pass an ordinance allowing noncitizens to cast ballots in L.A. city and school board elections.

But many of the details had not yet been worked out, such as which groups would receive the franchise and whether Los Angeles County election officials would be capable of adopting such a system.

These questions were raised again Tuesday by Councilmember Traci Park, who voted “yes” on the proposal two weeks ago, but said this time that too much is still unknown about how it would work. She voiced fears about the city’s ability to protect noncitizen voters if federal immigration agents show up at polling places.

“My concern here is that if this goes to the ballot, the voters won’t really know what they’re voting for, because we don’t really know either,” she said. “These are things that should be figured out well in advance before we put anything in the charter at all.”

Councilmember John Lee held up a print-out of a warning on the San Francisco elections website. San Francisco allows noncitizens to vote in school board elections, and the website includes a notice stating: “Any information you provide to the Department of Elections, including your name and address, may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies, organizations, and individuals.”

“Given the experience of the only California city that currently allows noncitizen voting, it is not fear mongering to raise these concerns,” he said. “They are real issues that must be addressed before Los Angeles asks voters to approve a similar system.

Soto-Martínez said he viewed the warnings from Lee and Park as fear mongering, noting that immigrant rights groups were ready to move forward with his proposal.

“This country was created by people taking courage and pushing so that everyone can have the right to vote,” he said.

Ana Cruz was 13 when she arrived to the U.S. from Mexico with her family. But after 23 years of living in Los Angeles, raising two children and working as a community organizer, she has never been able to vote in any elections because of her status as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, which doesn’t offer a pathway to citizenship.

She’s now among those backing a proposal from Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez that would allow noncitizens to cast ballots in city and Los Angeles Unified School District elections.

“For me, it will be the first time I will have a chance to vote and help decide who represents me,” Cruz said during a press conference in support of the measure at City Hall Tuesday. “Without a doubt, this strengthens our democracy.”

Soto-Martínez is seeking council support to include the measure in a package of City Charter reforms that will go to voters for approval in the Nov. 3 general election. The council is scheduled to discuss this and other proposed charter changes Friday.

The expanded voting eligibility would only apply to Los Angeles city and Los Angeles Unified School District elections, and not county, state or federal contests.

Other cities and states, including Maryland, Vermont and San Francisco, have adopted similar measures.

“People have spent many years here, and in many cases, decades, contributing to the city of Los Angeles,” Soto-Martinez said. “This is about local representation and local democracy.”

The proposal has already faced push back.

Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said Tuesday that noncitizens who pay taxes benefit from public services, and temporary status serves as a probationary period until people take an oath to become citizens.

“Citizenship does mean something, it means you are a fully participating member of society,” he said. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable to say you’ve got to do some time here and demonstrate that you’re somebody that we want as a citizen.”

If placed on the ballot and approved by voters, the City Council would then need to pass an ordinance creating a residential voting program and establishing eligibility requirements.

While those requirements have yet to be determined, advocates have discussed possible options might include extending voting to lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, DACA recipients and others who live, work and pay taxes Los Angeles, according to the council member’s office.

Soto-Martínez first pitched the idea in April, with the support of councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who also signed the motion.

Soto-Martínez represents District 13, which includes many immigrant and mixed-status communities living in Echo Park, Hollywood and Filipinotown. He said the Trump administration has terrorized communities by conducting mass immigration raids and breaking up families, and that his measure is aimed at underscoring the city’s values.

“We say L.A. is for everyone, and that means no exceptions,” he said.

Among those who could benefit are Grace McManus, a Filipina mother, caregiver and resident of L.A. for 24 years. With permanent resident status, she said she has no say in electing officials who shape her everyday life, despite contributing taxes and caring for the elderly.

“I am too familiar with the feeling of working and taking on low-wage work while feeling invisible because my voice is disregarded just because of our broken immigration system,” McManus said.

Public speakers at Tuesday’s City Council meeting also urged approval.

“Trump and MAGA want to limit voting. We need to fight to expand it, so all of our neighbors have the same rights as us,” said Julie Van Winkle, vice president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, during public comment.

Martha Arévalo, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, stood alongside Soto-Martínez as he rallied for support.

“We know that immigrant communities uphold the economy in this nation, and I think that people who contribute to their community, that call this home, should have a say in their local government,” Arévalo said.

The former mayor of a conservative Kansas town was taken into custody by immigration authorities after acknowledging last year that he had voted in elections despite not being a U.S. citizen.

Joe Ceballos, who was born in Mexico and is a legal permanent U.S. resident, was detained Wednesday during a meeting at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Wichita, Kan., according to his attorney, Jess Hoeme. He said Ceballos now fears he could be deported.

The 55-year-old resigned as mayor of Coldwater in December while facing state charges over voting as a noncitizen. While seeking citizenship in 2025, Ceballos admitted during an interview that he had voted, not knowing that green card holders don’t qualify, Hoeme said.

Ceballos was charged with voting illegally but pleaded guilty in April to misdemeanors in a deal with the Kansas attorney general. His case has drawn attention from the Trump administration and inspired supporters in his community, some of whom held signs reading “We Support Mayor Joe” and “ICE Out” as Ceballos walked into the federal building in Wichita.

“Let Joe go!” the crowd yelled.

“Thinking what could happen — it’s just kind of crazy,” Ceballos told reporters. “Obviously nervous. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know where they’re going to take me and what I can and can’t do inside there.”

An email seeking comment from the Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned.

Trump and other Republicans have been warning of the dangers of noncitizens voting in elections since the beginning of the 2024 presidential election. Research, even by Republican election officials, show the problem is rare.

This year, Trump has been pushing Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which among other things would require documented proof of U.S. citizenship to register and vote.

The administration also has significantly upgraded a program within Homeland Security that checks citizenship. At least 25 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, have used that system to check their voter rolls.

Ceballos was brought to the U.S. from Mexico by family when he was 4 years old. Hoeme said lawyers would next try to get an immigration judge to release him on bond.

He said Ceballos, at age 18, was encouraged to register to vote on the spot during a school field trip to the Comanche County courthouse. Ceballos has previously said in interviews with reporters that he voted for Republicans.

He was twice elected mayor of Coldwater, population 700, and also served on the city council. Ceballos won a new term in November but resigned after state Atty. Gen. Kris Kobach charged him with voting without being qualified and election perjury.

Kobach’s office, however, reached a deal with Ceballos. He pleaded guilty to disorderly election conduct, which Hoeme described as a misdemeanor similar to disturbing the peace.

“He has not been convicted of any kind of voter fraud. It should not have impacted his immigration status,” Hoeme said. “The Trump administration and ICE have doubled down on nonsense that he is a criminal.”

Ceballos has been a popular figure in Coldwater, where an advertisement in the Western Star newspaper encouraged people to support him.

“He’s kind of got to live the American dream, to come from absolutely nothing and build up — I don’t know about wealth — but to build up a business and have a job and be a productive part of society,” longtime friend Ryan Swayze told Wichita station KAKE-TV.

White writes for the Associated Press.

¿Qué en la fregada?

What the hell?

That’s what I muttered after learning that Los Angeles Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez wants to allow noncitizens to vote in city and school board elections.

Talk about a solution in search of a problem, considering everything Angelenos are facing right now.

While the specter of la migra continues to haunt the city, far more crushing are problems that affect everyone — affordability, housing, traffic, pollution. Maybe Soto-Martínez and his colleagues should double down on fixing those things first and sell their message better to voters instead of picking up a new issue?

I know the first-term council member comes from a good place. His parents were formerly undocumented, just like my dad, and he has been a fierce advocate for immigrants going back to his labor organizing days. I have friends without legal status and others in the DACA program for people who came to the U.S. illegally as children. I think giving them, as well as green card holders and others with papers, a chance to participate in elections is a righteous idea.

But to paraphrase the Book of Ecclesiastes, there’s a time and a place for everything. In 2026, Angelenos should be focused on electing people and approving initiatives that will improve the city for everyone, not a narrow plank benefiting a slice of the population.

So I called up Soto-Martínez and challenged him to convince this doubting Tomás.

He hopes his proposal will reach the City Council later this month for a vote on whether to place it on the November ballot. If voters pass the measure, it goes back to the council to decide when — if ever — to enfranchise the immigrants.

The proposal, already vilified in conservative media, isn’t as radical as it seems. Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, but there’s a well-established history of their participation in local ones, including in Vermont and Maryland. They can already vote in L.A. neighborhood council elections, and in San Francisco school board elections if they have a child in the district.

Besides, L.A. has long led the way in weaving undocumented immigrants into the fabric of civic life.

This is a sanctuary city where Mayor Karen Bass has stood up to President Trump’s xenophobia. Where eight of the 15 council members are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Where LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho — himself formerly undocumented — has striven to make local schools as welcoming as possible (Carvalho is on paid leave after the FBI raided his home and office earlier this year). Even the LAPD learned decades ago that it’s better to embrace undocumented immigrants than castigate them for their lack of legal status.

“If you’re contributing to this economy, you should have the right to decide who represents you,” Soto-Martínez told me.

Fair point. But isn’t thumbing our noses at Trump asking for more of what he has already inflicted on L.A., making life even more miserable for undocumented immigrants? Could he use the noncitizen voter rolls as a list of whom to deport? Besides, doesn’t extending the franchise to noncitizens give fuel to his crazy conspiracies about stolen elections?

“You always hear, ‘Don’t poke the bear, don’t instigate them,’ but that’s not how you deal with a bully,” Soto-Martínez replied. “They’re coming at us already. While they’re removing people’s right to vote in the Supreme Court, we’re expanding it. … And it has nothing to do with Trump. It’s about fairness.”

Tell that to Trump.

I mentioned that Santa Ana — a city far more Latino than Los Angeles, though not as liberal — decisively rejected a similar measure in 2024. Soto-Martínez’s fellow Democratic Socialist council members, Ysabel Jurado and Eunisses Hernández, have voiced their support for his measure. But I wonder whether the full council will move it along to voters in a year when some members, including Soto-Martínez, are running for reelection.

I couldn’t get a comment from Bass. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who’s running against her, said in a statement that Soto-Martínez’s push “is worth taking seriously” but that it’s “critical to getting this right, and we must not make decisions lightly or quickly.”

“We’re going to have to organize,” Soto-Martínez acknowledged. “But we live in a political moment where it’s the right conversation to have about what this city stands for.”

Avance Democratic Club President Nilza Serrano at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights in 2022.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

He’s going to have to convince people like Nilza Serrano. She’s president of Avance, L.A. County’s largest Latino Democratic club, and heads the California Democratic Party’s Latino caucus. Serrano is no wokosa — she supported Rick Caruso in the last mayoral election and is now siding with Bass.

While Serrano thinks Soto-Martínez is on to something, she said that voting rights for noncitizens are a nonissue for the people she’s trying to get to the polls for the June primary and November general elections. The economy and Trump’s deportation deluge are more on their minds.

I asked if Soto-Martínez’s proposal would cheapen citizenship for people like her. Serrano and her family came here legally from Guatemala in the 1980s before becoming U.S. citizens, a process that took years.

“Not for me,” she replied. “But it’s hard to say for others. I’d have to do a little bit more research.”

So I continued with my own research, calling someone I was sure would have a fit about the idea: Los Angeles County Hispanic Republican Club President David Hernandez.

“Isn’t San Francisco already doing it?” the Navy veteran cracked.

I thought Hernandez would go on an anti-liberal rant, but.…

“I believe there’s a strong argument,” he said, “that if someone has established residency and is a member of the community and suffered the consequences of whatever local policies will be enacted, they should have a say in who gets elected.”

Did the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta, California’s original avenging Latino, suddenly possess Hernandez? To make sure I was hearing right, I asked again if noncitizens voting in L.A. elections is a good thing.

How could he support that, as a Trump-voting Republican?!

“We have to be pragmatic,” he replied. He approves of noncitizens voting in L.A. neighborhood council elections, because that’s true local control.

He understands that allowing them to vote in municipal elections might come off as an insult to the memory of civil rights activists who lost their lives fighting for that right for Black Americans. But U.S. citizens are already taking it for granted, he noted — turnout in the November 2022 L.A. mayoral election was a pitiful 44%.

“Maybe noncitizens will appreciate voting more than citizens,” he said.

I’m still not fully convinced that Soto-Martínez’s push is wise right now, but I like that he’s being careful.

“We need to get in the weeds of this,” he said of the City Council’s deliberations, which he characterized as attempting to ensure maximum benefit and minimum fallout.

Let’s see what they come up with in a few weeks.

May 1 (UPI) — Federal prosecutors are suing New Jersey for offering qualifying noncitizen residents in-state college tuition and state-funded benefits, the latest state the Trump administration has accused of discriminating against out-of-state Americans in its anti-immigration crackdown.

The Justice Department has brought nine lawsuits challenging states’ laws often called Dream Acts, which generally offer noncitizens who have lived in and attended high school in the state for several years the same college tuition that citizen residents are charged.

The Justice Department filed its lawsuit Thursday, asking the court to block New Jersey from enforcing two laws: one passed in 2013 that offers in-state tuition to eligible noncitizen residents, and another passed in 2018 that extends their eligibility to state financial aid programs and scholarships.

Federal prosecutors alleged in the lawsuit that the laws “blatantly discriminate in favor of illegal aliens over U.S. citizens from other states” and violate federal law, which bars states from offering postsecondary education benefits based on residency to people unlawfully present in the country unless U.S. citizens are eligible for the same benefits.

“Imagine being denied the opportunity of education in our own country. By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, the state of New Jersey is doing just that,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement.

The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration carries out an aggressive anti-immigration policy that has included mass round-ups of noncitizens to revoking deportation protections for those from war- or catastrophe-torn nations.

Almost exactly a year ago, President Donald Trump signed the “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens” executive order, which directed the attorney general to identify laws “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens,” including state laws “that provide in-state higher education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-state American citizens.”

Of the nine lawsuits challenging these Dream Act laws to date, Texas, Kentucky and Oklahoma have resolved their cases either through agreements, consent decrees or joint motions.

Lawsuits are still pending in Illinois, Minnesota, Virginia, Nebraska, California and now New Jersey.

According to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, 21 states and Washington, D.C., provide in-state tuition to undocumented students, while 18 and D.C. also provide access to state financial aid.