After months of “kicking the can down the road,” as Councilmember Joe DoVinh worded it, the Garden Grove City Council is having a know-your-rights resource page created on the city’s website.
The proposal — recently brought to the dais by Councilmember Ariana Arestegui — narrowly passed, with Councilmember George Brietigam absent and Mayor Stephanie Klopfenstein and Councilmember Cindy Tran abstaining.
Local residents and activists had been pushing their elected officials for months to issue a response to local concerns about immigration enforcement activity.
The product of these concerns was a community resolution presented to the dais in late October asking councilmembers to “promote protection of due process and civil liberties for all” and to post an immigration resources on Garden Grove’s website. But before voting on that original resolution, council members wanted to tweak the document’s verbiage.
“And this resolution, I don’t see it as an anit-ICE resolution. I reject that notion,” DoVinh said. “I edited it heavily so that it’s not an anti-ICE resolution.”
The council’s heavy-handed edits stemmed from concerns, several councilmembers said, over fears of potential legal repercussions.
“Indeed, we may be investigated, and indeed, we may lose funding and, indeed, we may be prosecuted. Those are the risks. Helping others always comes with risk,” DoVinh said before the recent deciding vote.
Tran still had some concerns and suggested the council table the vote until some finer details on directions to staff were addressed.
“How much is this going to cost the city?” she also asked her colleagues.
Tran added she and the mayor have had some discussions about hosting an event in December at a local church to offer free legal services to residents.
More than a third of the city’s 171,000 or so residents are non-citizens, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The harsh and honest reality,” Arestegui said after the vote, “the reason that there’s so many young people leading the movement is because it’s so many of our parents and our elders that are on the line.”
“I want us to have no misunderstanding here that this is a community-driven effort and it’s our residents that have asked for this, that have been asking for this,” Arestegui said.
DoVinh said constituents could expect to see a resources page posted on the city’s website early next year.