ABOVE: Council member April Barker wants to build a relationship with the Blue Group. Image from city council video // cob.org
By Erasmus Baxter
The tension was palpable outside Bellingham City Hall as a crowd gathered in the unseasonably warm February night.
The majority seemed supportive of establishing Bellingham as a sanctuary city; they held signs, banners and flags, but what the group stood for had become a bit of a question mark. There had been a split in the group tasked with creating the sanctuary city ordinance.
The council was proposing “An Ordinance Relating to City Policy with Respect to Immigration Enforcement, Equal Protection, and Equal Provision of City Services Regardless of Immigration Status,” which purposefully did not even use the term sanctuary city.
However, the community groups in involved in the process, including Western’s Blue Group (a group of undocumented students and their allies), had proposed their own ordinance, the “Keep Bellingham Families Working Act.”
When the Bellingham City Council finally approved “An Ordinance Relating to City Policy with Respect to Immigration Enforcement, Equal Protection, and Equal Provision of City Services Regardless of Immigration Status,” in a unanimous vote at around 10:30 p.m., after hours of emotional testimony, it was to the disappointment of those on all sides of the issue.
“I know we’re disappointing you right now if we vote for this” Councilmember Terry Bornemann said. “[I know] we’re not giving you everything you would like with this.”
In their comments before the vote, the council members seemed more intent on defending the ordinance from criticisms then praising its virtues.
“I wish we could be all things to all people. I really wish there was something we could come up with to satisfy everybody. That’s just impossible for our line of work,” Councilmember Roxanne Murphy said. “My heart goes out to all the people who provided the testimony about the heartache you have gone through, and I have gone through as a tribal member in my life. But we have to start from somewhere in our community. We have to start with something practical.”
She seemed torn between her desire to help those vulnerable, and her sense of duty to represent all of Bellingham, including its vocal racist and xenophobic section.
“Criminals and Terrorists”
Those opposed to any form of sanctuary ordinance had been the first to talk at the meeting. They had managed to make their way to the front in the scramble up the stairs of City Hall to sign up to speak. They called undocumented people criminals and terrorists.
“Will you take responsibility when terrorist attacks strike our town?” asked a woman named Ashley.
Others were worried about President Trump’s threat to cut federal funding to sanctuary cities. The city council had received hundreds of calls from people worried about losing their subsidized housing, according to Councilmember April Barker.
Some felt that this was an unfair for people to come to the country legally. One Latino man whose family came to the country illegally spoke against the ordinance. He said that he had accepted racism as part of living in America and earned his citizenship.
Local street preacher Eric Bostrom delivered a speech claiming that Trump supporters were a persecuted minority. He even said that he was spat on at the Womxn’s March. (I have it on good authority that he was actually the one doing the spitting.)
ABOVE: Eric bostrom holds up a sign that reads “Not legal, not good.” Image from city council video // cob.org
A man named Rick, sporting a Trump hat, called the city council a “fascist junta,” prompting shared looks of disbelief among council members.
The Response
Blue Group and their allies were clearly prepared. In a volley of clear, measured testimony they individually addressed specific sections of the ordinance by section number, breaking down the issues with it. They asked the council to table the resolution and do more work on it.
“We don’t want an ordinance that tomorrow, if it passes, the next day [ICE] is collaborating with [the Bellingham Police Department],” Maru Mora Villalpando, the head of Latino Advocacy, a community group involved in the process, said. “We want an ordinance that is accountable to the people.”
The largest issues at stake were questions of enforcement and accountability. The “Keep Bellingham Families Working Act” included provisions that would fine city employees for violating its provisions and allow the city to be sued for such violations. It also instituted a civilian oversight board to ensure implementation of the initiative.
“It us up to you to be as brave as we are to stand before these racists,” Mora Villalpando told the City Council.
They also asked for strict prohibitions on sharing info between the police department and federal immigration enforcement agencies. As speakers referenced specific sections of the ordinance, the city council could be seen flipping through their copies to follow along.
The most gripping testimony came from lived experiences.
Olga Solano is a farmworker who has lived in Bellingham for almost 15 years.
“I’ve read the ordinance you’ve put together, and I don’t like it,” Solano told the council.
She started to explain how a recent executive order removes all immigration enforcement priorities and expands deportation of people without a hearing from border regions to the whole country without requiring conviction for a crime.
But then she paused.
“I could read this, but I just want to talk about my personal experience with you,” Solano said.
“About seven years ago, I got pulled over by the police. Basically, because I’m brown. I was just teaching my sisters how to drive, and the police, instead of giving me a ticket, he just called the border patrol and took my sisters away from me. And they were underage.”
At this point, Solano was wracked with tears.
“It’s painful for me to talk about this,” she said. “All I want you to understand is that we’re not criminals. I’ve been working here my entire life. I’ve been paying taxes. I contribute to your economy, and I demand respect. I’m a farmworker, and my parents are farmworkers. My dad got deported for the same reason. I just want you to understand: We are human beings. And we demand, and we deserve, respect.”
The City Council Discusses
When the two-hour comment period had ended, after a five-minute recess and the discussion of some brief other business, a much smaller crowd remained in the council hall.
Each council member discussed their thoughts on the ordinance. Most of their comments were placating. They saw this as the best they could get from their political perspective. While the speakers that night were overwhelmingly supportive, it was clear that the council had received many phone calls and emails that were not. They felt caught in the middle and defensive.
“Work with us,” Murphy said to the Blue Group members in the audience. “We’re willing to work with you on every one of these issues.”
Most pushed back civilian oversight of the police department as a separate issue.
“We have one of the best police departments in the world,” Councilmember Gene Knutson said. “Have faith. Have faith in us. Our police department does not go out and round people up. They never have and they won’t.”
Councilmember April Barker recognized that this wasn’t the whole story.
“Through our, especially white, mostly middle class, privileged lifestyle [it’s easy] to think that our police are just doing everything perfect and hunky dory,” Barker said. “It’s really hard to tell a group of people that everything’s going to be okay and you just need to trust the police, when their whole lives have been dealing with these injustices.”
Her motion to have the mayor’s office study forming a civilian oversight commission for the police was approved unanimously.
“We need to be very sensitive to people [who] are trying to explain to us that they’re seeing something different in Bellingham then what we’re all seeing,” Barker said.
Others questioned the legal basis for prescribing discipline and creating an additional section of liability for the city. They worried that prohibiting any coordination with Customs and Border Protection would inhibit efforts to fight for human rights.
Overall, they asked for peace and decorum. Knutson lauded the fact that by avoiding the title of sanctuary city Bellingham was avoiding the vitriol directed at other sanctuary cities. All hoped future issues would not be so tumultuous. However, April Barker’s final words indicated otherwise.
“There’s much broader issues here in Bellingham that we need to address, and one is our growth and the way that we’ve grown, and segregated ourselves and separated ourselves,” Barker said. “The meetings I’ve gone to and the emails I’ve received that are yelling for a sanctuary city, are the very same people who sit on neighborhood meetings, who told me they didn’t want anybody living next door to them unless they could afford a single-family home. When we start talking about housing, and we have a lot of work to do, I really hope you all will come forward and start talking about how we’re going to blend these situations and get ourselves living back amongst each other so we don’t have these divides.”
“Go Slow to Go Fast”
The next night, at a forum with Western’s Local Issues Team, Barker spoke about her philosophy, and discussed housing further.
Barker said she had been reluctant to run for office and took around 50 hours of consulting before she did. She said she had been hesitant to even get in politics, but her kid’s constant questions of “why?” had driven her to examine her own privilege. She saw housing, especially single-family housing, as part of this privilege. She recalled carrying meals to undocumented families who couldn’t leave their homes due to flooding in their neighborhood.
She was just coming to the end of her first year of her first term on the council and she shared a story that she felt illustrated her experience.
She was running late to her second job as a substitute teacher after a city council engagement and tried to climb a fence to get there faster. Falling from the top of the fence sliced her hand open.
As she stood there applying pressure to her hand, she saw a path right next to the fence. This seemed to be a metaphor for her first year on the city council to her. One could sometimes be more effective by waiting and building relationships to find the path than pushing and trying to climb over the fence.
She said she was planning on reaching out to Blue Group in a few days to try and continue building their relationship. “Go slow to go fast,” she said.
A Busy Few Days
That Friday, the “Keep Bellingham Families Working” coalition held a town hall at the Northwood Hall.
Blue Group members collected emails and handed out copies of the two ordinances at the door. The room was about three-quarters filled. Children played in the back.
Mora Villalpando facilitated the meeting. She was just returning to Bellingham after several frantic days of work and travel. She ran down what had happened in the week since the last town hall.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had detained Daniel Ramirez, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient living near Seattle, spurring protests and fears that ICE had was coming after all DACA recipients. Mora reminded everyone that, whether Ramirez was a DACA recipient or not, his father had been detained as well and will probably be deported.
There had been a march by immigrant workers in Burlington, possibly the largest ever. Several workers had lost their jobs for participating in the march, and a protest had been planned for the next morning.
A bill to establish Washington as a sanctuary state had died in committee, but they were reaching out to Governor Inslee to seek his help. In addition, sanctuary initiatives were being worked on at the county level.
Finally, just as Mora Villalpando had finally been about to sleep the night before, she got a call from a colleague in Texas asking her if the National Guard was about to be deployed in their state.
She walked the audience through the Department of Homeland Security memo that the person was referencing. It also called for expanding the program that allowed local police and sheriffs to act as immigration agents, making sanctuary cities and counties more important than ever.
The audience then broke out into groups and analyzed the differences between the Working Families ordinance and the one that the city council passed. The groups then presented on the differences, and proposed ways to move forward.
“You are all now experts,” Mora Villalpando told the audience. She asked them to call their councilmembers and tell them what they had just learned.
She then asked who would be willing to facilitate a similar discussion in coming weeks. Most of the room raised their hands.
“We will follow up with you,” she said.
The coalition was organizing and scaling up. They had no choice; at any moment, a new executive order could come out changing everything. In such uncertainty, there was no time to go slow.