L.A. City Council moves to bar workers from aiding any registry based on religion

Amid fears President Trump will create a registry based on religious affiliation, the Los Angeles City Council moved Wednesday to bar city employees from helping on such a program.

The City Council voted unanimously to ask city attorneys to write a new law prohibiting the city’s nearly 47,000 employees from registering individuals based on their religion or spiritual faith or participating in other discriminatory behavior.

Trump’s immigration policies and his statements on creating watchlists or registries have sparked criticisms and concerns in some corners.

The president has made contradictory and confusing statements in response to questions about whether he supports creating a database of Muslims, according to fact-checking website PolitiFact.

Trump’s team told ABC in November after he was elected that he “has never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion, and to imply otherwise is completely false.”

Several days later, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Trump, “Are you unequivocally now ruling out a database on all Muslims?”

Trump answered, “No, not at all. I want a database for the refugees, that if they come into the country, we have no idea who these people are. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse, and I definitively want a database and other checks and balances.

“We want to go with watchlists, we want to go with databases, and we have no choice. We have no idea who is being sent in here,” Trump added.

City Councilman Paul Krekorian authored the database motion and acknowledged that no one knows Trump’s plans.

“It’s important for the city to get ahead of this and say, ‘We’re not going to stand for this,’” Krekorian said.

Wednesday’s vote marks the latest defensive stance against Trump and comes weeks after city leaders announced a legal defense fund for immigrants and a plan to hire an immigration advocate at City Hall.

The council action also follows state legislation introduced last year by state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) that would prohibit state and local agencies from providing information to the federal government on a person’s religious affiliation for the purpose of compiling a database.

Lara has said the measure would not affect information shared by law enforcement officials for a targeted criminal investigation.

Krekorian’s motion also instructs the Los Angeles Police Department and city attorney to report on their efforts to respond to hate crimes and ensure the safety of Muslim Americans, immigrants and others in minority communities.

Also during Wednesday’s meeting, Councilwoman Nury Martinez read a verbatim statement that U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren had planned to recite criticizing U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s high-profile attorney general nominee.

Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was barred by her Republican colleagues from reading the statement as the Senate debated Sessions’ nomination. The statement was a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King, the late wife of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., attacking Sessions’ record on voting rights.

“This needed to be read into the record,” Martinez told her colleagues, “for Senator Warren and all of us who believe in civil rights for all.”

dakota.smith@latimes.com

Twitter: @dakotacdsmith

UPDATES:

3:30 p.m.: This article was updated with Councilwoman Nury Martinez reading the letter from Coretta Scott King that Sen. Elizabeth Warren was barred from reading on the floor of the Senate.

This article was originally posted at 1:30 p.m.