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LA wants city contractors to reveal if they work on Trump’s wall

Angelenos should know who’s building the wall.

That’s why lawmakers in Los Angeles have proposed to make city contractors disclose whether they’re also involved in building President Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times reported the City Council voted to draft a law requiring companies seeking or doing business with the city to disclose financial connections to the controversial wall, whose bidding process has been stalled over disputes about its fairness.

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The proposed law wouldn’t ban firms that worked on the wall from doing business with L.A. altogether, but its backers hope it’ll inform Angelenos about connections to a project with an immense impact on the city.

“We want to know if there are people who do business with the city of Los Angeles … who wish to profit from building a wall that would divide us from our nearest and dearest neighbor, Mexico,” Councilman Gil Cedillo said Tuesday. “Immigrants are the foundation, here in Los Angeles, of our economy. They are tightly woven into the social fabric of this city. And you cannot separate them or divide their families here in this city without disrupting the character of this city.”

The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area had the highest Mexican population of any metropolitan area in the country in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center.

The City Council is also exploring further steps, like making it harder to access or banning city contracts for companies that worked on the wall, for which the House recently approved funding.

As of March, according to the Los Angeles Times, over 20 Los Angeles County companies joined the more than 700 firms worldwide competing in the bid process to build a wall prototype in San Diego.

L.A. joins a growing list of local and state officials in California pushing back against the project, one of President Trump’s signature campaign promises.
Oakland and Berkeley both recently passed measures preventing their cities from doing business with companies that worked on the wall, and California State Sen. Ricardo Lara is backing a proposed law that would prevent the state from doing or renewing business with federal contractors connected to the project.