As President Donald Trump\u2019s renews his threats to send the National Guard to the Bay Area, Santa Clara County and San Jose are proposing \u201cICE-free zones\u201d that would prohibit immigration enforcement activity to take place on county or city-owned property.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the latest act of resistance against the Trump administration from a county<\/a> where more than 40% of residents are foreign-born and one in five immigrants are undocumented, according to county estimates.<\/p>\n Since Trump took office in January, the county \u2014 and its largest city \u2014 have pledged to protect its immigrant communities<\/a>, filing lawsuits against the federal government over its attempts to restrict funding to \u2018sanctuary\u2019 jurisdictions and spending on\u00a0programs like \u201cknow your rights\u201d trainings and immigration legal services. San Jose last month also instituted a policy that requires federal agents to remove face coverings<\/a> while conducting immigration enforcement operations within the city.<\/p>\n The latest initiative, which stems from the \u201cICE-free zones\u201d instituted earlier this month in Chicago, is being led by Supervisor Sylvia Arenas from the county and Councilmembers Peter Ortiz, Domingo Candelas and Rosemary Kamei\u00a0 from the city.\u00a0Both the county and the city have long held non-cooperation policies\u00a0that prevent officers from aiding federal agents in immigration enforcement efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is really in the spirit of standing with our community and letting our community know that we want to make sure that we are not somehow inadvertently responsible in helping carry out some of the immigration enforcement activities,\u201d Arenas said at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n The supervisor, whose district includes parts of San Jose, Morgan Hill and Gilroy, is asking officials to identify a list of county-owned or controlled properties that could \u201cpotentially be used for immigration enforcement staging, processing or surveillance.\u201d The proposal, which was unanimously approved by the board, also wants signage posted on those properties that notifies the public that immigration enforcement activities are barred on the site.<\/p>\n The San Jose City Council\u2019s rules committee is expected to vote on whether to move its own proposal forward on Wednesday afternoon.<\/p>\n Ortiz, who represents East San Jose on the City Council, said at a press conference on Tuesday that the effort started with a \u201csimple but powerful idea: that city property, property built and maintained by the people, should only be used for city or county purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen immigrant families see federal agents parked outside of our community centers, it doesn\u2019t just create fear, it creates barriers to education, to healthcare, to housing assistance, to the very services that help families survive in this Valley,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not who we are as a city, and that\u2019s not what our public spaces have been created for.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, the city proposal authored by Ortiz, Candelas and Kamei asks city officials to compile its own list of owned and operated properties \u201cthat are open space with publicly accessible parking lots that could be misused for non-city purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n The proposals have already garnered support from immigrant rights advocates who maintain that the initiative will help protect the county\u2019s diverse communities.<\/p>\n Jeremy Barousse, the director of policy at the nonprofit Amigos de Guadalupe, urged the board during the meeting \u201cto pass a strong policy that excludes federal immigration enforcement from using county property to execute their harmful family separation agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is our community and we must not let malicious federal agents use local government property to violate the constitutional rights and safety of our people,\u201d he said. \u201cOur county is a beautiful place that thrives due to the vibrant contributions of our immigrant communities and we must protect this diversity and our community with a powerful unifying partnership across the county that asserts \u2018hands off\u2019 our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, Santa Clara County is continuing its work to ensure it protects its immigrant communities in the event Trump sends the National Guard to the Bay Area like he recently did in Los Angeles. Deputy County Executive David Campos assured the board that \u201cno one is more prepared\u201d than Santa Clara County.<\/p>\n \u201cAs scary as it is, and we feel a lot of anxiety, we\u2019re actually ahead of the curve in terms of where other Bay Area governments are, and as a region the Bay Area is certainly looking to be more prepared than LA County was,\u201d Campos said. \u201cMy objective and the objective of the administration is to make sure we are as prepared as we can be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As President Donald Trump\u2019s renews his threats to send the National Guard to the Bay Area, Santa Clara…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[184,7,8,2871,14,181,100,88,90,89,198,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-16854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-bay-area","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-ice","12":"tag-immigration","13":"tag-latest-headlines","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-san-jose","16":"tag-san-jose-headlines","17":"tag-san-jose-news","18":"tag-santa-clara-county","19":"tag-south-bay"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}