Irvine City Council established the Immigration Assistance Program in a 5-2 vote on Feb. 24, creating a hotline to support Irvine residents and city employees affected by immigration enforcement and connecting detainees with legal representation.
Now operational, the program received $100,000 in funding to help targets of roving Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols, excluding those detained in actions backed up by a judicial warrant. This follows the detention of 12 people in Irvine by immigration agents, mayor Larry Agran said, with the city’s efforts prioritizing obtaining detainee information.
“Has he or she been processed, sent off to a detention center, for example, [Adelanto ICE Processing Center] in the high desert? Or has this person, without benefit of a hearing, been processed, sent to Adelanto, and perhaps then sent to a large detention center, such as in Texas or Louisiana?” Agran said. “We want to try to make sure that that person’s due process rights have been preserved.”
Although city funds will typically not support long-term legal representation, $300 would support individuals during intake, including to contract free or discounted legal services for those unable to pay.
“I know that a lot of illegal immigrants don’t have as much money to afford a lawyer or anyone to defend them,” junior Alex Rodevich said. “Seeing that it would make it either free or low cost is just, it’s a great thing to be doing for them.”
Vice Mayor James Mai, who voted against the program, said in the City Council meeting that ICE actions were federal, and therefore outside the city’s purview.
“Having the City Manager’s office basically hire an intake officer, this really politicizes the City attorney’s office. That puts the City Attorney’s job, who is to represent a municipal corporation, into a quasi-defense function for individuals facing federal enforcement, and that’s mission creep to me,” Mai said at the City Council meeting establishing the program. “We provided resources to people on the website here, Mayor Agran put forward a pamphlet as well. We don’t need to politicize this any more—we have a function of running a city here and doing the best for our citizens.”
Agran said that the program would likely expand alongside escalating immigration enforcement.
“When one person is snatched away, let’s say, from a workplace, and the rest of the family is left behind, this becomes a family crisis—it’s not just a crisis for that individual who was apprehended,” Agran said. “It’s hard to say precisely what a city can or should do, but when I take office and swear an oath of allegiance to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, that includes the Fifth Amendment: due process.”
