Los Angeles is One Step Closer from Becoming a 'Sanctuary City' After Unanimous Vote from City Council

The city of Los Angeles is one step closer to becoming a so-called "sanctuary city" after the L.A. City Council voted unanimously on the measure which had been championed by mayor Karen Bass who wrote a draft ordinance a few days back. The measure will come back to the council for a second vote as a formality.

Los Angeles now joins more than a dozen other cities in the country that take part of the ordinance which bars city resources from being used for immigration enforcement and city departments from sharing information on people without legal status with federal immigration authorities, key measures in anticipation of potential mass deportations under President-elect Donald Trump.

Sanctuary cities are not legal terms but have come to symbolize a pledge to protect and support immigrant communities and decline to voluntarily supply information to immigration enforcement official, as Border Report explains.

"We're going to send a very clear message that the city of Los Angeles will not cooperate with ICE in any way," said councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. "We want people to feel protected and be able to have faith in their government and that women can report domestic violence, crimes."

Mayor Bass had referred to the timing of the ordinance last week on the city's website as a "moment that demands urgency", adding that "immigrant protections make our communities stronger and our city better."

The push for the ordinance went into overdrive after a protest took place in downtown L.A. just days after Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections. In it, community members and immigrant rights advocates urged the city council to adopt the ordinance, claiming that it had been "languishing for two years at City Council." Felipe Carceres of the Service Employees International Union, one of the protest's organizers said at the time that:

"[The city needs to] make sure that undocumented workers know that the city of L.A. is a place where we're not going to have collaboration with ICE for anything"

Cities from New York to San Francisco have long-standing policies to support immigrants, but criticism of those measures grew with the influx of migrants in the last few years. Some of the backlash occurred after Republican governors in Texas and Florida began busing migrants to Democratic-led "sanctuary cities" last year.