The meeting on November 4, 2025, began with a work session from 6:00–6:50 PM, followed by a regular city council session at 7:00 PM, and concluded with a resumed work session to hear from Police Chief Jim Coleman. The primary topic was the recent surge in ICE enforcement activity in Hillsboro. Staff from the city manager's office, city attorney, police department, and community partners (Latino Policy Council, Washington County Chamber of Commerce's Latino Business Advisory Council) provided briefings. Over three hours of public comment were heard during the council session, with community members sharing fears, personal stories of family members detained, and demands for a state of emergency and increased protections. The council discussed legal limitations, funding for community organizations, police response protocols, and a proposal to study the feasibility of a human and civil rights department.
Fourth work session. Before we begin tonight's session, I want to thank everyone who is joining us here in person and online. To me, that is an indicator of how deeply we all care about Hillsboro. So again, thank you for being here. The session tonight, the work session will go from 6 p.m. until 6 50. We'll break and go into city council session, which work which starts at 7 p.m. Should we need to continue the work session after 6 50? We will do so after the city council meeting. Right now we'll be starting the work session, and the topic of the work session is the recent ICE activity in Hillsborough. The purpose of this work session is to receive briefings from staff from city staff and community organizations who are working with community members who are either directly or indirectly impacted by ICE activity. It's also for the council to ask questions of those organizations and staff and to discuss possible responses and possible response options. To set some expectations during the work session, it is time for city council to listen and learn from staff and community organizations and again to discuss possible courses of action for response. Please know that some actions are already in process. I ask that you do your best to listen during the work session so we can all hear what is being said. Know that public comment does not occur during work session, but it does occur during the city council meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. If you would like to make public comment during the city council session, please fill out a yellow card which you can find to the back of the room to your right, my left. Fill out the yellow card and you can give it to the deputy city recorder right there, and she will have it for the city council session, and you can have testimony during that city council session. I'll now turn it over to our city manager Robbie Hammond. Thank you, Mayor. Good evening, everyone. So before we get into the PowerPoint point, we can have that pulled up. First of all, just want to recognize the immense amount of stress that our community is under right now. Hillsboro is a wonderfully diverse community. It's one of our greatest strengths, and our employees take a lot of pride in serving everyone in our community. We are hearing from many people about how we can help right now. And tonight we want to share what we are doing, and we look forward to having a more discussion about what we can do in the future as well. So with that, um, we'll start with the PowerPoint. If you go to the next slide, I'll go through the agenda really quickly. Uh we're gonna just uh quickly talk about some of our shared values and goals. Uh assistant city manager Simone Brooks is going to be talking about current communications that we're that we're having, um the importance of promoting accurate information and understanding our impact of communities' needs. We have our city attorney Chad Jacobs that's going to talk through some legal considerations. We have police chief Jim Coleman that's going to provide uh the police HPD perspective on this. I'll talk a little bit about city staff and what we've done with city staff to try to prepare them. And then we're going to hear from some of our partners at the Latino Policy Council and also the Washington County Chamber of Commerce, Latino Business Advisory Council. Once that's done, we'll open it up for discussions and questions from council. Um, as Mayor Pace mentioned at five, excuse me, 6 50, we will break, go into the chamber for the regular meeting. We have purposefully left that meeting very brief in terms of items so that we can hear more time for public comments, and then we'll come back into work session if that's necessary. Um, so just I wanted to start by talking about a few areas that there are shared values. So the city council over the past several years has used guiding principles to guide what they do and to really determine what their goals are. Um, I'm not going to put them all on the slide because there's a lot of them. There's the the equity statement alone, is multiple paragraphs, but I would encourage you to go and look at our website and see what it is that the council really has declared already. And uh it's important to recognize that our council is united in wanting to help. Uh, we have city values and goals in our strategic plan, the same thing that really show us how we are supposed to serve our community. I I know that the council is united in their desire to support our community that's impacted by ICE right now. And um, one other goal that the council has specifically this year is the importance of promoting accurate information. So that's what we're gonna try to do tonight is make sure that we're sharing as much as we can, be transparent and share accurate information with the community. So, with that, I'm gonna turn the time over to uh city manager Seymour Brooks. Hello, council, good evening. Um, so I'm gonna take us through uh quite a bit of information.