June 8, 2025 Dena Jensen

Bellingham City Council is scheduled to consider a proposed resolution reaffirming the “City of Bellingham as a welcoming city” for all people on Monday, June 9, 2025. After the draft resolution recites a long list of COB measures that have been taken over the last few years that can help allow the City to incrementally become a more welcoming place for marginalized community members, the following statement in the operative section is included:

“BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the City of Bellingham is a welcoming city for all people to live, work, attend school, visit and play free of discrimination, violence and systemic barriers that threaten their safety, well-being and human rights;”

The statement above is not true and is not the same as the wording in the title of the resolution. It’s so obvious that discrimination, violence, and systemic barriers currently exist in Bellingham that I’m not going to spend a lot of effort to refute the claim. The entire draft resolution seems like it is focused on boosting the morale of City officials who often respond in defensive and sometimes damaging ways when community members in crisis call for urgent action from them. The resolution would be valuable if it spurred officials to take actions that are long overdue, but promise of that looks bleak at the moment.

Bellingham City Council Member Hannah Stone is presenting the resolution with a recommendation to “Vote to Approve.” Council Member Stone included the following paragraph in her memo related to the resolution:

“This year, people in Bellingham have expressed renewed concerns about their rights and safety. On April 16th during Old/New Business, I expressed interest in formally reaffirming our collective commitment to the policies and values that were proclaimed in the resolution that was passed in 2017. There was a unanimous motion from the full council requesting that I move forward with the drafting of a resolution in coordination with the City’s Strategic Initiatives Manager – Equity & Belonging, Deborah Bineza, Mayor Kim Lund and City Attorney Alan Marriner. Deputy Administrator Janice Keller and Senior Assistant City Attorney Sarah W. Chaplin have also been involved in this work.”

In the former 2017 resolution that this paragraph references, the opening sentence in the operative section states, “THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, That we will not turn our backs on immigrants, regardless of documentation status.”

However, some of the same City officials, who created this resolution, including Council Member Stone, turned their backs on immigrant members of the City’s own Immigration Advisory Board. Additionally, the newly proposed resolution refers to certain recommendations of that board while still avoiding a commitment to deliver on one of them that would help address some impacted community members’ most urgent needs.

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Here is a brief selection of part of the history that took place in the period between the two resolutions mentioned above:

◾️ Resulting from many local barriers to equity that immigrants in Bellingham have faced, a number of years ago they began calling on the City to develop an Immigrant Resource Center in Bellingham with direct input and areas of oversight coming from impacted community members.

◾️ Bellingham’s Immigration Advisory Board recommended the Immigrant Resource Center to City Council members in mid-2021, with officials initially offering support and gradually initiating plans, actions, and a small portion of funding to help move the center forward with the aid of a consultant. Then, at the end of September 2024 – a little over a month before the Trump administration was to take power of our country and commence carrying out their ongoing ruthless and relentless assault on immigrants – the City publicly abandoned the project.

◾️ The Immigration Advisory Board was dissolved by the Bellingham City Council at the same time the City announced dropping Immigrant Resource Center plans. They began doing this through a process that included numerous City officials making untrue claims against individual board members, as well as against the board as a whole without ever retracting them. This occurred during a time when the board membership was almost entirely composed of people of color, many of whom were also immigrants.

◾️ Key City officials ultimately never sat down with Immigration Advisory Board members to either discuss their plans to potentially dissolve the board or eventually inform board members of the decision the City made to do so without discussing it with them. On a related note that’s associated with federal actions since then, one of the board members and strongest advocates for an Immigrant Resource Center is now imprisoned in Tacoma’s immigrant detention center.

Click this link to view the full “Whatcom Immigration Justice Timeline: Community Organizing Toward A Bellingham Immigration Advisory Board”

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In conjunction with all this, it will be dangerous for Bellingham to sell marginalized community members on versions of the invented part of this new draft resolution that cast the City as free of harm for them: some individuals trusting in the City’s assertion but who are subject to being targeted may more easily come to experience assaults on their safety, well-being and human rights; people who have already endured discriminatory injustice in the City, both in the near and more distant past, will suffer the indignity of the City’s denial of their experiences; and some community members who aren’t subject to the same dangers as marginalized peoples may assume there is no need to take immediate action to ensure the City amply protects those peoples.

Neither the City’s hopeful intent that is being signaled in the title of the resolution and its recitals, nor all the City measures taken thus far to reduce harms caused by local government to marginalized community members are anywhere near enough to eliminate the discrimination, violence and systemic barriers that currently do exist. When the proposed resolution declares that Bellingham is a welcoming city for all people, they project a perilous fantasy worthy of the PR consultants of fossil fuel and tobacco companies. That doesn’t bode well for officials taking actions of a needed scale and urgency to effectively address the many traumas of injustice marginalized people are experiencing there.