The 55-year-old has helped Republicans on policy and handled communications for the Orange County Taxpayers Assn. and the Richard Nixon Foundation. Friendly, smart, quick-witted and a total goodie-goodie, she corrected me last fall when I introduced her to my Chapman University history students as a Republican. To my surprise, the Orange native proclaimed that she has never been a Republican \u2014 she started out as a Democrat and is now an independent. <\/p>\n
And that\u2019s not the first surprise she\u2019s sprung on me. Her recent rise as one of O.C.\u2019s most vocal politicians opposing President Trump\u2019s deportation machine has been unexpected \u2014 and welcome.<\/p>\n
She called out her council colleagues in July for not approving a resolution<\/a> that would have required federal immigration agents to remove their masks and wear IDs within city limits. She connects young activists to legal and financial resources and has participated in neighborhood patrols alerting people that la migra is coming. She has accompanied Orange residents to hearings at Adelanto\u2019s immigration court and hosted a two-part video series for the civic affairs group Orange County Forum on how the U.S. got to this moment in immigration. <\/p>\n Why, Barrios has become so radicalized that she used the hash tag #brownwar throughout the summer and into the fall when posting immigration-related stories on Facebook. That stopped after her husband, an anti-Trump Republican, suggested it was a bit much.<\/p>\n You would expect this of a politician from an O.C. city with a progressive streak, like Santa Ana<\/a>, Anaheim or even Laguna Woods. But not from Orange, whose city fathers have long cast it as a slice of small-town Americana free from big-city problems or national issues.<\/p>\n And definitely not from Barrios, whose demeanor is usually more baseball mom than strident activist.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been asked multiple times, \u2018What\u2019s up with Arianna? This is not her,\u2019\u201d said Orange Councilmember Ana Gutierrez, who has seen ICE agents invade her street twice. \u201cWell, when she cares about something, she\u2019s loud.\u201d<\/p>\n Working with Barrios on pro-immigrant actions is \u201clike talking to a young person,\u201d said 20-year-old Chapman student Bianey Chavez, who belongs to a local youth activist group. The two connected at a protest in their hometown\u2019s picturesque Orange Circle<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s fresh air for someone of her age and power to be so open-minded and helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n Anaheim Councilmember Natalie Rubalcava, who has known Barrios for over a decade, said she had \u201cnever heard Arianna speak on any issue like this in the past. But it\u2019s great. Maybe she just felt empowered at this point. Maybe anger just boiled up in her, and she couldn\u2019t be quiet anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s exactly what happened, Barrios told me over breakfast at a Mexican caf\u00e9 in Old Towne.<\/p>\n The immigration raids that have rocked Orange County<\/a> as hard as L.A. \u201cjust hit all of those buttons,\u201d she said. Wearing a blouse decorated with orange poppies, the bespectacled Barrios looked every bit the polite pol that O.C. leaders had taken her to be. \u201cNot only is it just patently unfair, it\u2019s just so wrong. And it\u2019s so inhumane.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd one of the things that I can\u2019t stand \u2014 and one of things I taught my kids \u2014 is if you see a kid being bullied, my expectation of you is that you go up to that kid and you go protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n Councilmember Ariana Barrios holds up a vest and hat she bought from Amazon while arguing about the dangers of ICE imposters.<\/p>\n She credits what her father jokes is \u201can overactive sense of justice\u201d to her grandparents, who ran a corner store in Santa Ana in the 1940s. Barrios Market became a meeting place for the families who helped organize the 1946 lawsuit that ended Mexican-only schools in California<\/a>.<\/p>\n Their granddaughter didn\u2019t know any of that history until her 20s, because her upbringing in 1980s Orange County was \u201clike a John Hughes movie.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t even really think of ourselves really as, like, Hispanic \u2014 I mean, we all were, but it wasn\u2019t the end-all be-all,\u201d Barrios said. \u201cWe were all trying to be Valley girls.\u201d<\/p>\n Living in Nacogdoches, Texas, for a few years in the 1990s \u201cwoke her up\u201d to anti-Latino racism. But after returning home to find county and state officials passing anti-immigrant laws<\/a>, she didn\u2019t join the resistance, as many Latinos of that era did. Instead, Barrios focused on starting on her career in communications and later raising two sons. <\/p>\n \u201cI remember even having my own stereotypical thoughts about [illegal immigration], not really understanding what the experience was, how people got here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Things began to change as Barrios worked for school districts \u201cmaking sure that kids had access. I didn\u2019t care about their status.\u201d It became personal once she was appointed to the Rancho Santiago Community College District Board of Trustees in 2011 and met refugees as well as recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants a reprieve from deportation to some immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. She hired some at her PR firm.<\/p>\n The council member brought up the 1986 immigration amnesty that Ronald Reagan signed and an unsuccessful 2001 bill co-sponsored<\/a> by the late U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that would have created a pathway to citizenship for people who came to this country without papers as minors.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s so odd about where we are right now,\u201d Barrios said. \u201cThe two biggest programs, to get people to protected status and to legal resident status, came out from under Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n After winning another four-year term in 2024, Barrios figured she\u2019d spend her time trying to fix Orange\u2019s fiscal crisis<\/a>, especially because she thought \u201cso much of what [Trump] was promising on immigration was rhetoric.\u201d<\/p>\n An onslaught of federal immigration raids in the L.A. area starting in June made her realize things would be different. What finally sparked her furor was when federal agents handcuffed U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla<\/a> after he crashed a June news conference featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of this garbage about [Noem claiming], \u2018I didn\u2019t know who he was and he didn\u2019t identify himself\u2019 was bulls\u2014,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was just bulls\u2014. But if you\u2019re willing to do that, you\u2019re willing to do anything. There are no limits.\u201d<\/p>\n She admits to sometimes \u201clos[ing] my cool\u201d while speaking out against Trump and his deportation deluge, arguing it\u2019s necessary to spark change in a place like Orange, which has a long history of anti-Latino sentiment. Within walking distance from her home is a former movie theater where Latinos were forced to sit in the balcony into the 1950s. In 2010, the City Council tried to ban day laborers and voted to support an Arizona law that made it legal for local law enforcement to question people about their immigration status<\/a>. <\/p>\n It\u2019s history Barrios knows and cites now but that barely registered with her back then.<\/p>\n \u201cIf people want to be nasty to me, I can\u2019t stop them,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I can try and explain where I\u2019m coming from so that, as I told my sister once, it\u2019s not for the person I\u2019m talking to, it\u2019s [for] everybody who\u2019s watching the fight.\u201d<\/p>\n Her husband \u2014 who joined her at a No Kings rally during the summer and will join her this weekend at one she helped organized \u2014 feels \u201cnervous\u201d about her newfound advocacy, she said. <\/p>\n But her late grandfather and her father, a Democrat who was the first Latino elected to the Orange Unified school board, wouldn\u2019t have hesitated to protest against Trump\u2019s cruelty, she said. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t even think twice about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Barrios asked for a to-go box for her chorizo and eggs, which she barely touched during our hourlong chat. Then she reached into a cream-colored Kate Spade purse to pull out red cards. <\/p>\n \u201cKnow Your Rights,\u201d they read, delineating what people can and can\u2019t do if la migra asks them questions.<\/p>\n \u201cI carry these all the time,\u201d she said, leaving some on the table. \u201cI see people and go, \u2018Here you go. Just take some, OK?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until recently, no one would have mistaken Arianna Barrios for a wokosa. The Orange city council member comes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,6215,6209,6211,14,3410,6216,6210,6212,611,592,3020,6214,338,6213,4610],"class_list":["post-5753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-arianna-barrios","tag-barrios","tag-city-father","tag-immigration","tag-kid","tag-mexican-immigrant","tag-o-c","tag-orange-city-council-member","tag-orange-county","tag-people","tag-president-trump","tag-republican","tag-santa-ana","tag-status","tag-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5753","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=5753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n