AN ORDINANCE relating to the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs; amending Ordinance 125207, which adopted the 2017 Budget, changing appropriations for the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to provide $1,000,000 from the General Subfund in 2017 with an automatic carry-forward to 2018, solely to provide legal representation, or to provide guidance and referral services for legal representation, to indigent Seattle residents and workers in immigration proceedings; and establishing standards for the provision of legal representation and guidance and referral services for legal representation; all by a 3/4 vote of the City Council.
Third part of the Gender Equity. Safe Communities and New Americans Committee Agenda Item one Constable 118 946 relating to the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs amending Ordinance 125207, which adopted the 2017 budget. Changing Appropriations for the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to provide $1 million from the General Fund in 2017 with an automatic carry forward to 2018 solely to provide legal representation or to provide guidance and referral services for legal representation to indigent Seattle residents and workers in immigration proceedings. In establishing centers. For the provision of. Legal representation and guidance and referral services for legal representation all by 3/1 vote of the City Council. The committee recommends the bill pass. Councilmember Gonzalez. Thank you so much. I would like to move for the adoption of Council Bill 118946. Thank you. This ordinance is designed to add $1 million to the budget for the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs in order to establish a legal defense fund. The Legal Defense Fund will be administered as a grant by the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs and will be subject to a competitive request for proposals process that will include consultation with potential nonprofit organizations who would be able to use those funds to be able to provide these types of services. The services that are intended to be provided are really with regard to anything related to an immigration proceeding that includes complex naturalization cases, which we heard some testimony about today. It will also include providing removal defense. And really, we're going to bring in community into the request for proposal process to give us a better understanding of how these funds should be prioritized and what the greatest need for our existing immigrant and refugee community might be. And so I'm going to reserve comments for the end right before the passage of the bill, but I wanted to just describe the nuts and bolts of what the legal defense fund would be and and how that relates to the request for proposal process. And finally, we hope to be able to once this is passed, we hope to be able to infuse these funds into the community sometime in June. Thank you. Councilman Burgess, as co-sponsor, would you like to say a few words? Thank you very much. First, thank you to Councilmember Gonzales for your leadership on bringing this forward. As I said a couple of weeks ago when we first talked about this, I think cities and counties that value and protect immigrants are actually stronger communities. Recent studies have shown that they have less crime and stronger economies. This particular legislation here will, by enabling and establishing the Legal Defense Fund, will strengthen Seattle and our region and is certainly very consistent with the values that we hold and cherish so much. It will uphold the rule of law and protect immigrant rights. It will prevent families from being unfairly torn apart. And it will enable our businesses to thrive with the valuable talents that immigrants bring to our community. This legislation is good for people appearing in front of our immigration courts. It's good for our economy. It's good for public health and safety. It's good for all of us as Seattleites. Thank you, Councilman Burgess. Any of my colleagues like to say a few words about this. What? I'm considering landmark legislation. Told us that customers want. Thank you, President Harold. And very happy to be able to vote in favor of this ordinance to allocate $1,000,000 to a legal defense fund for detained immigrants. As many of the accounts have highlighted during public testimony, having access to legal representation can make all the difference to the many human beings who are caught in this extremely unjust system. I thank all the dedicated legal service providers throughout this nation who are doing this important work. I wanted to share one story that I was part of, which collectible Legado del Pueblo, which is a really important group providing such services. Many of them, as one of our speakers said, are indigent and cannot afford these services. So it's really important the work that they're doing. But they had organized this political action in coordination with the legal defense that was being carried out. And so we were all gathered at the ICE office in Dakota last week in solidarity with Jose Robles, who has who is you know, he's going to be in the process of deportation, unfortunately, unless we build a movement that will stop it. But the reason I'm mentioning this is because in my mind, it was a very important confluence of legal action and political and mass action that need to go hand in hand. In my view and my own experience of being there was really poignant to me as an immigrant, because when you go to this office in Aquila, there's a happy floor where people go for their citizenship and swearing in. But I went a few years ago as an immigrant and there's two floors up is what I call the room of hopelessness, where so many people end up, where you either go in with, you know, you or you only come out with paperwork that you live on borrowed time in the country, or you go out with an ankle bracelet or you're picked up for deportation. It truly is the room of hopelessness. And it was a room where regular working people end up. There were so many women there, women with children, children with their toys. It is an absolutely it's an absolute indictment of the completely dysfunctional and unjust system that we have. And we were there in solidarity with Jose Robles, who is a family man with children. His young daughters were in tears. And I thought that was the most striking thing about him, was that he was a worker who helped build the Capitol building in Olympia, which is the capital of our state. It's such an irony that people who actually lay down the bricks of the capital building of our state are also being targeted. And it really highlights how widespread the need is to build our movement. I also wanted to say that because of this, we have to remember that we will not be able to win a decent society on a case by case basis. So along with the legal defense, we also need to build a political mass movement that stands in solidarity with immigrants. There were so many important examples May 4th, 2006, when immigrants nationwide went out on strike and defeated the Sensenbrenner bill. And more recently, we had the success of the approach. When Trump trade is Muslim travel ban and mass demonstrations, peaceful demonstrations shut down airports across the country. That was the starting point for the victory against that Muslim ban. And there's another example from history. When an overwhelmingly Republican Supreme Court passed Roe v Wade, which was a landmark abortion rights decision that was under the right wing Richard Nixon administration. All of these victories were won solely because mass movement decided to build independently of the political status quo. And right now, as another speaker mentioned, are immigrants. Sisters and brothers are helping to build that movement with hundreds of detainees at the Northwest Detention Center, having started a hunger strike last week to protest inedible food, a dollar a day, wages which are slaves, wages and other inhumane conditions. I really thank everybody who has already become part of the movement and urge everybody watching this to join us on May 1st, which is International Workers Day and also historically immigrant rights protest day. So let's all fight together, right? To my colleagues, I'll say a few, and then I'll turn it back over to one of the sponsors. I describe this as landmark legislation because indeed I think that it is, and I think it's very appropriate that it's coming from a committee with the term new Americans in its title. You know, this rhetoric about making America great again. I think what we're missing is to make America great. You invest in the immigrant refugee communities that you see the strength that that brings to a country and brings to a city and brings to a county, and you invest in that strength. And so I think this cuts at the core of where we need to go as a civilization. And I look at this as an investment. So I'm very proud to serve with colleagues that see the wisdom of this investment and prioritize this in a budget where we have competing demands on the budget. And so I think this is what Making America Great is all about, is welcoming people to our country. So thank you for this, and I'd be very proud to support it when it comes time to vote. So having said that, Councilmember Gonzales, would you like to close the debate on the issue? I would. Thank you so much. I want to thank everybody who has spoken on behalf of and in favor of the legal defense fund. I want to just take a minute to thank all of the community leaders and members of the community who came out today to provide public testimony in support of this, the immigrant rights immigrant excuse me, Immigrant Refugee Commission. Noor Gonzales Hawk as a Latina MP Rewa Ethiopian Community Council, Ala Care, Church Greeter, Church Council, Seattle, CIC and so many others who have been incredibly supportive of our effort to to make sure that we can find funding for such an important program. I want to thank my co-sponsor, Councilmember Burgess, for working with my office to make sure we could find the money and to make sure that the legislation was as pristine and clean as it could be. You're an excellent editor. Thank you so much. I also want to thank the mayor's office and the city budget office for also assisting us. I want to thank the Office of Immigrant Refugee Affairs for giving us insight and making sure that we have enough flexibility in the underlying legislation to make sure we truly meet the needs of the community. And of course, I want to thank Patricia Lee from central staff, who was the primary lead on drafting the legislation. And I also want to thank my office staff, Roxana, who helped us organize so many of the of the community to be with us today. And Genevieve Jones, who did so much of the research and policy work up and worked closely with members in the community to make sure that, again, our proposal would be one that was reflective of what the true needs of the community are. So, Genevieve, thank you so much. I know you're hearing her tweeting, but I really want to thank you for all the hard work that you did. And then our our most recent addition to the office is V. And she has been really helpful in helping us get this over the finish line. So thank you so much for that as well. And I just wanted to note that as we are having this debate, we are standing as one with King County as well, who is currently passing their own funding for for immigrant refugee communities. And they're calling there's a resiliency fund which provides, in addition to funds for legal defense, a host of other wrap around funding that will really complement what we're doing here in the city. So it's pretty amazing to be taking this type of legislative action collectively as one with our county. You know, a lot of a lot of you know that I come from an immigrant family myself. My parents came here from Michoacan, Mexico, when I was when before any of my siblings were born. They came here as undocumented immigrants from Mexico and lived in the shadows for many years, several years before being able to adjust their own status. And I grew up in central Washington State in the lower Yakima Valley, where it was a common occurrence for people to live in mixed status families, whether it's your mom or your dad or your aunt or your uncles or your cousins. There's that concept of living in a community where not everybody has the privilege of having been born in this country is a reality. And I often remember times when our neighbors who were undocumented had gotten whispers of the fact that there were that ice was in the neighborhood and they were doing roundups. And let me tell you, the chilling effect that that has on a community is remarkable. You know, kids stop going to school. People stop playing in the street. Nobody goes to the grocery store. These are real life impacts. That's fear that we talk about when we talk about the threat of deportation or being detained is not a hypothetical. It is felt by our communities every day. And just because we live in progressive Seattle doesn't mean that our community isn't feeling that same sense of fear. And and and to me, this is a. A really beautiful opportunity for this council and for this city to truly stand on its values, not just in not just by virtue of showing up at protests and and rallies, but by putting those values into legislation and funding real, meaningful resources for immigrant refugee communities so that they can have the best chance, their only fighting chance to stay here in our community and continue to contribute positively and not be separated from their families under these draconian immigration laws that we have that have needed to be and that we have demanded to be updated and reformed for many, many, many years. And so this is I'm so honored and humbled to be able to be a co-sponsor on this legislation and to advance this forward today. You know, at the end of the day, due process, it's a cornerstone of our democracy. And this is exactly what this legal defense fund recognizes is the concept of due process. The concept of of an inviolable right to be able to access legal representation so that you can have due process is is what we are doing today. And you know what it is? This is a timely matter for us right now. As we speak, people in the Northwest Detention Center are refusing to eat, to protest inhumane treatments. They've organized a hunger strike before. This is not the first time that this hunger strike has been as has been demanded. And in fact, I as the former board chair of One America, the state's largest immigrant advocacy organization, we as that organization commissioned a study that found many years ago a string of human rights violations that were occurring at our Northwest detention center. And so these hunger strikes are absolutely important for us to understand what is motivating them. And our fund will hopefully address the need for the representation that those individuals have. And my hope is that we will be able to put these dollars to good use so that when Trump continues to assemble his mass deportation force, we have an opportunity to, at a minimum, tell our community that we will be there with you standing next to you shoulder to shoulder when that moment happens, because because of no one else is going to give you a fighting chance. We will. And this is how we do that. So with that being said, I'd like to vote on this one. Okay. Please call the roll on the pastor of the bill. Marez o'brien. So I thank Shaw Burgess Gonzalez, I Herbold Johnson. President Harrell. All right. Nine in favor nine opposed. Bill passed and chairman Bradley Simon. Very good. Please read the next agenda item into the record.