The Arlington County Board has set aside $50,000 for grants to support families whose primary wage earner has been detained by immigration enforcement.
Grants distributed by Arlington Thrive will provide up to $2,000 per affected family over the coming 10 months. Funds will support basic needs such as housing, food and utilities.
The 4-0 vote, with Board member Susan Cunningham absent, was taken at a special Board meeting on Sept. 2 in response to a recent immigration enforcement surge in the D.C. area.
“We stand with our immigrant families, and we will not stop doing so,” Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said. “We are valuing the families of those that have been displaced and removed.”
The grant agreement allows for Arlington Thrive to provide funding in the form of checks or debit cards to meet individual circumstances of individual families.
If neither format works well, the organization and county will work with the families on an alternate option.
“A lot of these families are unbanked,” County Manager Mark Schwartz said.
Elizabeth Matlock, a staff member in the county manager’s office who is coordinating the effort, said the funding will be available shortly.
“Thrive is eager to get started with this project,” she said.
The County Board’s action follows an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation that resulted in roughly 1,300 arrests across the D.C. area during two weeks in August. It is unclear how many of these arrests took place in Arlington.
Federal law prohibits local governments and their law-enforcement agencies from interfering with federal immigration operations, de Ferranti acknowledged in August. However, he said that Arlington leaders “will do everything we can within the law to provide support and to protect the safety of all our residents, documented and undocumented.”
One arrest during the recent ICE operation, that of Jose Mejia Hernandez, has prompted an investigation by the Arlington County Police Department. Mejia Hernandez has alleged that he suffered a brain bleed and other injuries after ICE reportedly chased him and shot him with a stun gun in a parking lot on Columbia Pike on Aug. 11.
Mejia Hernandez’s case has attracted national attention. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner and Reps. Don Beyer, Suhas Subramanyam and James Walkinshaw, all Democrats, released a statement last week supporting ACPD’s investigation and criticizing the circumstances of Mejia Hernandez’s arrest and other recent ICE actions.
