 Thanks for tuning in to DCTV here at Davis Media Access. I'm Autumn Labbe-Reneau, and this is The City Considerers. This is a new program we've started that will help us address city-wide issues and upcoming city council business. Today happens to be our first episode, and I'm really pleased to have with us our mayor, Rob Davis. Welcome, Rob. Thanks for inviting me, I appreciate it. Glad you're here. We chose to, we could have chosen a lot of different topics, and we chose to start with something that's very topical and very relevant here in town, and that's our status as a sanctuary city. I know this is work you've been spending a lot of time on, so let's start with what does it mean to be a sanctuary city? Yeah, well, for us, I mean, there's a history to it which stretches back long before I was even in the city, which is really at a time in our nation's history when there were significant numbers of people coming from Central American war situations who were being given refuge in a variety of communities. I think over time, it's evolved much more into a statement actually about how we want to police our city. So in 2014, we reaffirmed our commitment as a sanctuary city, and we did so at a time when there was a lot of discussion nationally as there is now about immigration, undocumented immigration, and what it means for us to have a significant number of undocumented immigrants in our community who provide many, many essential services in the ag and restaurant and service industry. So essentially, it's our statement to the community saying that in any interactions with police or law enforcement in the city, any interaction, whether it's someone being stopped for a broken tail light or whether it's someone approaching the police for assistance, that in no situation will our police department request information on their status, their immigration status. And the intent there is to signal that that is not a concern of ours. It's something that is the purview of the federal government, not local government. But most importantly, we want to say to people, you do not have to be afraid of our police. You do not have to be afraid that somehow if you contact the police, they're going to be asking you questions which could lead you to problems later on. And we think that makes us a safer city. We think it makes us a city where citizens can feel, our citizens, people who live here, who are part of our community can feel confident that their interactions with the police will be safe ones. And of course, we're trying to approach interactions with the police on a variety of levels. This is just one area where we're trying to send a clear signal that we want you to feel safe and confident in using services offered by the community. What's changed since January 25th and the so-called travel ban? Well, the travel ban is a little bit different than Sanctuary City because the travel ban really affects people who are coming into the country with documentation. The travel ban was about saying, look, citizens from these seven countries are not, at that point, are not permitted to enter the country. And the people that are most affected by that, quite frankly, are people in our community or people who are coming to the university or coming to visit family and friends at the university under normal document status. So our Sanctuary City status doesn't really refer or doesn't really have reference to that particular, that's introduced to a whole host of other challenges. And I've been able to reach out to John Garamendi and our local representative to inform him as to the impact of that decision. And of course, we were thankful for what the local, what the courts here on the West Coast have done to put a hold on that. But that is not any action, that action was not particularly influencing our Sanctuary City status. What has, the other thing that's really changed is Donald Trump's statements during his campaign and subsequent statements about his intent to remove federal funding from Sanctuary City status, Sanctuary Cities. And that's where a little bit more light has been shown on the concept and has caused some anxiety. And for us, there's a couple of things there. Number one, he hasn't defined legally what sanctuary status is. Number two, we are not, there is no law that compels our local police force to collaborate with ICE or the Department of Homeland Security on immigration actions. There's none. Further, if ICE requests any hold on a person so someone gets detained and they request a detainer, that is not a legal document. It does not require any jurisdiction to hold that person. In fact, the Constitution in the form of the Fourth Amendment does not allow you to hold someone without a probable cause, without a charge. And so, personally, and some of those things don't apply to us as a city and we can get into that, but personally, I think what Donald Trump is trying to do is he's bullying cities. He's trying to, he's making a political statement that has no basis in the law. And recent Supreme Court cases have made it clear that the federal government cannot remove funding from a jurisdiction for a decision they make. They can't remove funding outside of the narrow binds of whatever that issue might be. So if the federal government's providing funding for police equipment in a city and the police say, well, our police are not gonna participate, they may be able to withhold funding there, but not road money, which has no nexus with that. So my personal opinion, I think the opinion of our city attorney and our police chief is that, and I'll only speak for myself, but my sense is they would agree with me, is that this is political posturing. This has nothing to do with us not complying with relevant state, federal laws, and the Constitution of the United States. And so, we reject categorically the notion that somehow the federal government can come in and do harm to us on the basis of that property. This is where it gets confusing for people because I've even heard questions out in the community. Are we breaking the law? No. How does this put the city at risk? It does not put the city at risk. Right, and so I'm hearing. So my earlier question, a slight rephrase was sort of the whole Trump administration policy on immigration right now, and you've addressed that. What are you hearing from people in the community? What are the concerns that people are bringing to you as the mayor? Well, I mean, so there are some people that are saying, why are we maintaining sanctuary status? I mean, why would we do that? Why would we put ourselves at risk? And our clear commitment and our clear statement is, as I've already noted, we are within the law. We are within the Constitution of the United States. Second, we are doing this because we are responsible for the safety of our community. Now, let's be clear. If someone is the victim of a crime in our community, do we want them to withhold information about that crime because of their fear of the police of being detained? No, because then we give in to the posturing and the bullying. Exactly. We want a safe community where everybody feels secure if they're the victim of a crime to come forward and receive help that they need in dealing with that. If we create a situation where our population is fearful of approaching our police, then arguably we're creating a less safe community. And the reasons why cities that are sanctuary cities across the nation have stood up, and in the case of San Francisco, we even sued the Trump administration on this point, is because they understand that a decision, which is politically based, which has no basis in security and safety, will have detrimental effects on our safety. And by the way, a lot of people will ask me, and you asked what people approached me about, but what about the case in San Francisco? Because the San Francisco Sheriff's Department did not cooperate with the federal government, a person was let out of jail and committed a murder. Okay, that's a false narrative. First of all, a detainer was placed on that person, which is a non-binding, as I said earlier, it's a non-binding action, it's a voluntary action. They did not offer information to the San Francisco police that this person was actually being sought for felony, for reasons of a crime committed as a felon. They did not provide a warrant. They did not provide probable cause. They did not provide information. And so the San Francisco Sheriff was not under any obligation to hold that person. In fact, arguably would have been going against the Constitution to hold that person without cause. Well, that's been turned into a narrative that the San Francisco Sheriff's Department was not cooperating with the federal government. That's a false narrative. In our county, though we don't control what our Sheriff does here locally, meaning in the city, if we detain someone, they are taken to the county jail and they do come under the jurisdiction of the Sheriff. Our Sheriff just has made it clear that he is not going to hold people on detainer. If a duly executed warrant by a grand jury or by a judge is presented providing probable cause for holding someone, any jurisdiction in the country, any jurisdiction who's holding someone and receives a duly executed warrant of that type will turn that person over to whatever jurisdiction is requesting, whether it's the federal government or another jurisdiction within the state or beyond the state. So there is no issue of non-cooperation here. There's a very narrow issue of voluntarily holding people for without cause in many cases, on an immigration detainer. And that's where there is no requirement for participation. Turns out cities and jurisdictions can voluntarily work with the federal government. There's a program within the law that allows that. Our county, our city, I don't know if any in the state have voluntarily entered into an agreement with the government to basically allow local police to act as immigration enforcement. But we're not going to do that because it's antithetical to the safety concerns that we have. So on the one side of people being fearful about the federal government imposing something on us, that's our response. We're acting within the bounds of the law. This is a statement from our attorney. This is a statement from our chief of police. This is not Rob the politician stating this. We're on solid legal ground. And we're confident that our local jurisdiction, excuse me, the sheriff's department will also not be holding people on detainer. As I said, warrants, that's a different situation. Now let me address concerns on the other side. I think one of the things that I think we need to understand is there are lots of rumors now. I won't say every day, but nearly every week, at least every week, I'm hearing people calling me, texting me, Facebook messaging, whatever, saying I understand there's DHS, Department of Homeland Security activity here. What's going on? I heard this person was arrested. We have the possibility to, a lot of times we're not aware. We're not informed ahead of time on actions that are taking place. But I think it's important, and up till now, all of them have been proven to be just that rumors. But we have to be clear that the Department of Homeland Security encompasses a number of offices that have a number of functions. And for example, it's come to my attention recently, and I know other people in the community are aware of it, that we have significant challenges in this region with human trafficking. There is sex trafficking and there's slave labor that occur in our region, even within, there have been some cases even closer to home than the region in our county. And to the extent that these rings, and they're mobile, so we're not talking about trafficking that's situated in locales, it's moving, it's moving. People are being moved around constantly. It's a real problem. It's a huge problem. We're learning about it through our hospital system, who's making it unfortunately really clear that they're seeing people show up in their emergency rooms who are severely impaired, and they're the victims of one form or another of this trafficking. We know it's there. And we also know that we're thankful for arms of the Federal Government Department of Homeland Security who are doing, and the FBI who are doing investigations into this. And so there may be, there was another example recently of I got a text saying there's Homeland Security activity going on in West Sacramento. Well, there was a woman who drove onto the bridge, the Tower Bridge, and said she had an explosive device that was gonna blow up the bridge. Turns out when a piece of infrastructure like that is threatened, the Federal Government Homeland Security immediately comes in. It turns out in that case she had, excuse me, some mental challenges and was taken care of and there was actually no bomb, but it did lead to an action which caused great fear in the community. What we can commit to in the community is informing people about what we know, what's happening, excuse me, what's happening and what the outcome is. And up until now, we don't have evidence that ICE is active in the region or in the county detaining people on immigration status issues. We're actually almost at the end of our time, believe it or not. It flew by, it's such a dense topic we can come back and revisit it as things continue to develop. But if people, best way to get information, best way to interact with the council. You know, I just encourage people to send me an email. Ourdavis at cityofdavis.org. I'm easy to find on Facebook, I'm interacting with people more and more through that media. I'm happy to find out what I can. I think our police chief there in Pytel is extremely responsive. I'm gonna be meeting with him again very soon to put a finer point on some issues that I would like clarification on. But if people wanna just contact me directly, I think other council members are Davis at cityofdavis.org. We're happy to talk to people about their concerns and do what we can to answer their questions. Thanks so much for coming in today, Rob, and helping us, you know, do the inaugural episode of this series. You've been watching The City Considerers here on DCTV at Davis Media Access. Find us online at dctv.davismedia.org. Thanks.