Grand Rapids City officials once again are dismissive of the Cosecha led campaign to get sanctuary policies adopted

Once again there were several dozen people who specifically spoke about the 6 sanctuary policy demands that Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have been demanding since January of 2025. And once again two elected officials were dismissive in their comments, Commissioner Belchak and Mayor LaGrand.

Commissioner Belchak said that since 2017 the City has already had in place policies to address ICE and immigration. This is false, since the GRPD’s Foreign National Policy was not even adopted until 2019 and the only reason that happened is because of how racist the GRPD acted in regards to the case of Jilmar Ramos Gomez.

Both Commissioner Belchak and Mayor LaGrand made comments about activists not listening to them, by not sticking around for their closing comments, but the reality is that despite efforts to have real conversations with Grand Rapids City Officials, only Commissioner Kilgore has met with Cosecha. Cosecha has been trying to meet with Mayor LaGrand since June when he said during a commission meeting that he would be willing to meet with Cosecha. Cosecha held a Press Conference to address the failure on the part of Mayor LaGrand to meet with them in August and at the end of August I wrote an article that included Email exchanges between the Mayor’s office and Cosecha and how the Mayor was not willing to meet the immigrant-led group on their terms.

As always, Mayor LaGrand has a great deal to say, which you can watch from the video beginning at the 3:35:55 mark.  

Mayor LaGrand said that he has been working with the ACLU on discussions on how to do things that can benefit undocumented immigrants. “The ACLU document says draft all over it, which shows that you don’t do things immediately,” said LaGrand. This is misleading, since it was Cosecha that has been meeting with the ACLU since the beginning of 2026 to work with them to craft a draft of an ordinance that could be presented to City officials. Mayor LaGrand conveniently leaves out the role that Cosecha has had in the draft ordinance document, which you can find here.

Mayor LaGrand went on to say in his comments last Tuesday, “Every time someone says they want us to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies, I say, yeah us too. The heart of those sanctuary policies were adopted a number of years ago. They are on the website and people can go look at it.”

I have responded to what the City website says in response to the Cosecha 6 sanctuary policy demands. I am listing them here with a response to some of them in bold.

• The City does not operate a detention facility or jail. Kent County operates the county jail. The Trump Administration has been pushing detention centers in abandoned warehouses and GR has several of those. Cosecha is demanding that the City adopt a policy to never allow vacate buildings/warehouses to be used as detention centers.
• The City does not have a 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The City currently does not, but the Cosecha demand is to adopt a policy that says Grand Rapids will never sign a 287(g) agreement with ICE.
• The City does not enforce immigration detainers. This is true, but Kent County does. When the GRPD arrests immigrants for non-violent offenses they end up in the county jail and then the Sheriff’s Office holds them for ICE.
• GRPD is prohibited from conducting investigations or making arrests based solely on a person’s immigration status.
• GRPD’s Foreign Nationals Policy prohibits collaboration with ICE on investigations. The GRPD’s Foreign Nationals Policy does provide language that says, “The policy allows officers to provide assistance to federal immigration authorities when there is an emergency that poses an immediate danger to public safety or federal agents.” In addition, Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have first hand accounts and photo evidence of GRPD assisting ICE during ICE arrests.

For a brief period Mayor LaGrand shifts to talk about snow removal suggestions.

Then beginning at 3:41:00 in the video Mayor LaGrand said that something “snapped” for him. LaGrand then explained that he spent a day with an immigrant who had an appointment at an ICE office in GR to make sure that person got in and out safely. The person thought he had a work visa but didn’t, since it was on appeal. This is the kind of work that GR Rapid Response to ICE does every week, which they have shared at City Commission meetings, with no response and no affirmation of the work.

Mayor LaGrand then went on to say, “The real issue is that the federal government has a broken immigration system. Work visas and a reasonable clear path to citizenship. The presence of ICE in Grand Rapids makes him sick, but the real problem is getting rid of those unjust (immigration laws), that make no sense and that we have been trying to fix for 30 years.This is all a federal elected problem, it’s not a problem for the GR City Commission. I hope you will starting demanding better from federal elected officials,” said Mayor LaGrand.

I’m glad the Mayor came to this realization about how the US immigration system doesn’t work for most immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants. However, for the Mayor to say that people have been trying to fix these unjust immigration laws for the past 30 years is a bit misleading. US Immigration Policy has always been rooted in white supremacy and xenophobia, which I have studied for decades, which are reflected in my Popular Education Class slides – History of US Immigration Policy. I also have been doing an 8 week class on this very topic since 2019 on an annual basis, just like the class I am doing right now that has completed 6 of the 8 weeks.

However, the larger problem of why US immigration policy fails immigrants is not just the policies that are unjust by design, it is the fact that US military and economic policies create the displacement and desperation of immigrants who enter the US through the US/Mexico border without documentation, which are addressed in week #4 and week #5 of the class on the History of US Immigration Policy.

Lastly, the most important point to make here is that Mayor LaGrand evades taking any responsibility for not adopting policies that would reduce the harm to immigrants, particularly when it comes to the ongoing GRPD collaboration with ICE. Mayor LaGrand wants us all to think the city has nothing to do with it, since it is solely the fault of the federal government. Failure to act when families are being separated every day is not leadership, it is abdication.