Local officials know they can’t completely stave off ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, but they’re taking new approaches to push back as much as they can.
State and local elected officials want to stop immigration-enforcement officers from wearing face coverings, removing license plates from their cars, using chemicals against protesters and deploying other aggressive tactics. Some local officials are going out to monitor ICE and helping residents track agents’ activity.
“I think there’s a lot of hope here in Portland,” city councilor Sameer Kanal told NOTUS. “I hope there is in other cities as well around how we can use our collective voice in a way that’s going to achieve as much as we can within the limited scope of power that cities have.”
In the midst of President Donald Trump’s administration targeting Portland, Oregon, in its crackdown on Democratic cities, the city council approved proposals last week codifying its sanctuary jurisdiction status, first passed in 2017, that requires training for how city government officials should interact with ICE. The council also passed a resolution barring ICE from county property that is not open to the public.
Kanal sponsored the sanctuary city ordinance and said he’s working on other changes to city code to limit ICE agents from hiding their faces and using tear gas against his constituents.
He acknowledged that cities have limited power. “I would be doing this even if I didn’t think it had a chance to succeed,” Kanal said.
Other local governments also made moves last week to resist ICE.
In Cook County, Illinois, which encompasses Chicago and its suburbs, the board president signed an executive order barring federal officials from using county property and resources for immigration enforcement.
Los Angeles County officials took the unusual route of declaring a state of emergency over ICE raids, opening the door for providing rent assistance to people targeted during raids. That tool is usually reserved for natural disasters, but Trump and governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have used it to act against illegal immigration.
Emergency declaration may not happen elsewhere. Kanal said taking that approach could backfire for Portland.
“We are not in an emergency posture at this moment in the sense that the Trump administration’s narrative conveys,” he said. “They are describing us as on fire, in chaos, all these complete and utter falsehoods, and we don’t necessarily want to give credence to those sorts of delusions that the federal government has about Portland.”
But Cook County commissioners Jessica Vásquez and Kevin Morrison, who is running for the U.S. House, said it was worth considering.
“Passing similar legislation at the county level wouldn’t have teeth if we didn’t have our municipalities opting into it,” Vásquez said.
Morrison pointed to the detention of government officials and American citizens as a reason why the county should look into declaring an emergency.
“Whether or not this arises to a state of emergency, I will have to do some deeper diving on what those qualifiers are, but I would say we are in a certain state of emergency that definitely needs a better response from the state all the way on to the local levels,” he said.
The limited funds available to local governments could prevent them from enacting options to resist ICE raids, such as providing money for legal aid for immigrants, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. There’s also the issue of jurisdiction.
“The options themselves are coming up against the preeminence that the federal government has when it comes to immigration enforcement,” Bush-Joseph said.
At the state level, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias this week launched a hotline to report federal agents removing license plates from their cars. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a portal encouraging people to submit photos and videos of ICE activity. The move came after ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, said in an interview Wednesday with Fox News that there would be an increase in arrests in New York City.
James appeared in federal court Friday for her arraignment after a grand jury indicted her for bank fraud in the latest politically charged case brought on by a Trump-appointed prosecutor.
A California law barring ICE agents from masking is set to go into effect in January, and is likely to face legal challenges. Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, posted on X in September that the state law had no effect on federal operations.
Aside from ordinances and legislation, Vásquez said local elected officials needed more courage in standing up against ICE. She’s part of a rapid response team monitoring ICE activity in the northwest area of Chicago.
“I understand that it is a very overwhelming and a very scary thing to witness when I was in front of federal agents for the first time. I just remember feeling very, very scared, but these are unprecedented times that we are in, and this federal administration, they’re not going by the rules,” she said. “And so I think that it is important for all of us in positions of power, because we have a lot of privilege as elected officials, and I think we need to be courageous, and I think we need to think outside of the box.”
Elected officials haven’t been exempt from the use of force from federal immigration agents in Chicago, who have detained a city elected official and staffers.
Illinois state Rep. Hoan Huynh, who is running for Congress, posted a video on X of immigration agents surrounding his car Tuesday while he monitored their movements throughout the city’s northwest side. He said they stopped him at gunpoint, which is not shown in the video but the Department of Homeland Security didn’t deny it to local news outlets.
DHS said in a statement to Chicago’s PBS station that Huynh had been stopped for stalking the agents, which the lawmaker labeled as a false characterization.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment. FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi have vowed to act against Democrats’ efforts to unmask agents, track their activity or arrest them.
“No one’s allowed to touch a cop on my watch, and no one is going to touch a cop on my watch,” Patel said in a Wednesday interview with Laura Ingraham. “And on the off chance that they do, or participate in this scheme … they will find themselves in handcuffs.”