Welcoming City Ordinance
Update: At the January 14th Council meeting, the Welcoming Ordinance passed for a third reading, which ordained it as a law. The final text of the ordinance can be found here.
With the inauguration on January 20th of a president who has promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the US, it’s appropriate for Medford to pass measures to resist that. One thing I’ve been working on is Medford’s Welcoming City Ordinance, and I’ll use this post to briefly review what that means.
What’s in the ordinance
The text of the ordinance, and its various edits, mainly clarify that Medford won’t expend resources to cooperate with ICE if they want to round up undocumented immigrants. It has nothing to do with criminal investigations, which the Medford Police Department will cooperate with regardless of immigration status of suspects. Council also included some additional protections for whistleblowers, as well as requirements to report enquiries from federal authorities to the Mayor and City Council.
Will this ordinance affect current practices? No. All of this has been the policy of the Medford Police Department since 2019. But this policy is not enshrined in our city’s ordinances, and the importance of doing so took up a good amount of discussion at the December 10th committee meeting. So the ordinance won’t cause any changes, but it will prevent changes for the worse from happening in the future.
The local process
The resolution to develop a Welcoming City Ordinance was introduced by one of my colleagues in 2023 and referred to the Racial Justice, Disability, and Elder Affairs subcommittee, a committee that has since merged into the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee (which I chair). Work on this ordinance stalled for over a year until after the November 2024 elections, when advocates from Medford People Power encouraged City Council to proceed with it. We worked on a draft of the ordinance at the December 10th Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee meeting, which was essentially boilerplate language given to us by a lawyer from the ACLU. This meeting saw an extensive public comment period of supportive residents. In the next week, I juggled between the ACLU lawyer and Medford’s legal representation to rework language such that it would clarify the relationship between Medford and the federal government while avoiding potential administrative and union conflicts with the police department. This resulted in an edited draft that was discussed in a regular Council meeting on December 17th, then passed (6-1) for a first reading. If it passes its third and final reading on January 14th, it would become an ordinance six days before the change in presidential administrations.
As far as legislation goes, that’s all pretty speedy. This is mainly because (1) there was a timeliness factor with events happening at the national level, (2) these ordinances are common and thus do not require any real creativity to write, and (3) extensive conversation had already occurred about this over a year ago when the resolution to discuss the ordinance was first introduced.
Context
Most news reports I could find listed eight cities in MA as Sanctuary Cities (another term for a Welcoming City). The downside to being a Welcoming City is the risk of cuts to federal funding, which Trump promised to do in his first term. I’m not that worried about this because he largely failed to actually accomplish that. But, even if I were worried, I refuse to allow that to factor into my internal calculus, because it’s never worth it to put a price tag on people.
