This week, Santa Ana Councilman Johnathan Hernandez failed in an attempt to divert city funds earmarked for hiring more police officers and use it for an “Emergency Assistance Program for Families Impacted by Immigration Enforcement.”
Hernandez also proposed defunding and cancelling the city-sponsored Independence Day celebration on July 4th while keeping the city-sponsored Mexican Independence Day celebration fully-funded.
Hernandez, an inveterate critic of law enforcement who has publicly accused the Santa Ana police of “funneling” Latino residents into prison and “criminalizing Chicanos.” In 2023, he tried unsuccessfully to appoint an advocate of abolishing the police to the city’s police oversight commission.
Hernandez also refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance – when the city council rises for the flag salute before each meeting, Hernandez leaves the dais and stays in an anteroom until the patriotic ritual is over.
Santa Ana, where illegal aliens comprise an estimated quarter of the city’s population, has been ground zero for ICE enforcement in recent weeks. On Tuesday, the seven-member, all-Democrat city council took up several agenda items related to the current upheaval stemming from ICE activity.
Among these was a $1 million “Emergency Assistance Program for Families Impacted by Immigration Enforcement” intended to provide aid for families whose primary income-earner has been detained by immigration authorities.
Funding was to come from general fund monies already earmarked for several community events, including $115,000 for the Fourth of July and $498,000 for the Fiestas Patria (which celebrates Mexican Independence Day).
Hernandez opposed cancelling and defunding these events, with the sole exception of the 4th of July.
“I’m supportive of us moving $115,000 away from the 4th of July and cancelling that event,” Hernandez told his council colleagues, “Given that the consensus in the public is that they don’t feel safe” to attend the July 4th celebration.
Hernandez cited no evidence to support his claim that Santa Ana’s 310,000-plus residents would feel unsafe at an Independence Day celebration.
“I’m not going to support defunding cultural events in the brownest city in Orange County,” he declared.
Instead, Hernandez advocated raiding the police department budget and taking funds earmarked for hiring more police officers.
He attempted to justify this by claiming the Santa Ana Police Department had “defunded “ the city fire services.
“When we were going through the recession, the Santa Ana PD helped defund our fire [department], claimed Hernandez. In his telling, the police were the movers behind “defunding” the fire department and “outsourcing it to the County” in 2012.
The reality is more prosaic. Like most California municipalities, Santa Ana was (and is) confronting relentlessly rising pension costs, and firefighters are typically the highest-paid city employees. Joining the Orange County Fire Authority was an efficiency and cost-saving measure that preserved firefighting and EMS services.
Hernandez’s attempt to fund financial aid for undocumented residents by defunding the 4th of July and police hiring found no support among his colleagues, who opted to seed that assistance fund by diverting 10” of the money budgeted for community events and tasking staff with figuring out how to come up with the rest of the money.
