Denton City Council votes to approve resolution deprioritizing enforcement of abortion law

McGee’s pending decision came as a shock for supporters who had gathered en masse at 6 p.m. in front of City Hall in support of the resolution. Several erupted into an outburst when McGee began reading a prepared statement that seemed to indicate he wouldn’t be supporting the resolution, pointing out that Denton must comply with state law and couldn’t become a sanctuary city for women seeking abortion.

One supporter told McGee he had supported him, had knocked on 4,000 doors for him during his recent campaign and then stormed out of the room, calling McGee a fake and promising to petition for his recall.

McGee had been receiving veiled threats all evening that he would be recalled if he voted against the resolution his supporters had voted for him based on his progressive values.

The council took a short break to allow the police, who were 20-strong at the meeting, to escort the upset supporters from the council chamber.

When the council members returned to the dais, McGee apologized to other members for the threats he said he and others had received regarding this resolution.

“I don’t respond well to threats,” he said.

Then, in a surprise move, McGee voted in favor of the resolution, ensuring its approval.

“Regarding how I’m going to vote,” McGee said, “please remember that I was one of the original four people to put this resolution on the agenda. I support this resolution.”

Drafting a movement

It has been nearly two months since Politico’s report about the Supreme Court’s readiness to strike down Roe v. Wade, based on the first draft of the majority opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Drafted in February, the ruling ended a half-century of federal protection, allowing the states to determine whether abortion should be legal or illegal.

Like many others who heard the news, Kara Sheehan knew the end of Roe v. Wade was coming and that she and others needed to do something. Based in Dallas, Sheehan is the Texas chapter manager of Local Progress, a national movement of local elected officials who seek to advance a racial and economic justice agenda through all levels of local government.

She began speaking with advocates and local officials from across Texas about what it would be like to live in a post-Roe world and what they could do at the local level to make sure taxpayers’ dollars would not be used to investigate people’s medical care, Sheehan told the Denton Record-Chronicle in an interview Thursday.

In Austin, this desire manifested into the Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone (GRACE) Act. Austin City Council member Chito Vela — along with Mayor Steven Adler and council members Kathie Tovo and Page Ellis — drafted the resolution to prohibit Austin police or personnel from investigating abortions and restricted city funds and city staff from being used to catalog or report abortions or suspected ones.

The GRACE Act doesn’t decriminalize abortion or defund the police but simply makes investigating people who consider abortion a low priority for Austin police to investigate. Sheehan compared it to cities with sanctuary city policies, which prohibit local law enforcement agencies from complying with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers.

There are 37 cities around the country with sanctuary laws on the books, according to a March 2021 Center for Immigration Studies report. None are in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott banned cities from implementing such policies in 2017.

After Vela drafted Austin’s GRACE Act resolution, Sheehan shared it with former Denton council member Deb Armintor who, in turn, shared it with District 4 council member Alison Maguire, who presented a similar resolution to the council at an early June work session.

Sheehan said many people in Texas are looking toward their local officials for leadership, especially since Texas’ Human Life Protection Act is written in a way that anyone who performs an abortion — including those through the self-managed abortion pill — could face prosecution under the law.

Shortly after the Supreme Court issued its June 24 opinion, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released an advisory about what will happen once Texas’ Human Life Protection Act, also known as a “trigger law,” goes into effect, which won’t happen until after the Supreme Court issues its judgment after the rehearing has closed.

Paxton wrote that people who “knowingly perform, induce, or attempt an abortion, except under limited circumstances, such as a life-threatening condition to the mother caused by the pregnancy” will face a first-degree felony and a fine up to $100,000.

“There is no way in my mind that this is not going to affect people’s lives at a local level,” Sheehan said. “I believe in my heart that local government’s role is to ensure that their communities are safe, and they are safer when they have access to health care they need to thrive, and that includes abortion.”

A two-day retreat

Maguire’s resolution didn’t receive a full discussion of council until the council retreat this past weekend. The council holds the retreat annually, and each retreat focuses on the council’s priorities. Stuart Birdseye, a city spokesperson, said that in previous years, the council discussed specialized topics such as council requests, which led to the one-minute pitches during work sessions, council dynamics and effective meetings using the Robert’s Rules of Order, which offers guidelines for how to run a meeting.

The 2022 council retreat delved into how a council should operate — by having respect for one another regardless of a person’s political spectrum, and running the city like a board of directors instead of a political machine to pass national agendas on the local level.

About an hour into the second day of the retreat, council members and the mayor discussed Maguire’s proposed resolution to make enforcing Texas’ abortion laws a low priority for police.

“We have an abortion issue that is coming to the Denton City Council that then puts my family’s life in danger,” Mayor Hudspeth said. “And I’m upset about it.”

“That’s not a local issue,” said Julia Novak, the facilitator from Raftelis consulting agency.

“I know it,” Hudspeth replied. “It’s a resolution that is coming. Here is the problem: You have people on this desk who don’t think about the fact that as the first Black mayor, I get text messages and heat that they don’t understand.”

Hudspeth said the resolution was unnecessary and worried about his and other council members’ safety on Tuesday night while the council was voting on the resolution. He offered some background on the resolution, explaining that Local Progress had contacted Armintor, a former council member, about Austin’s resolution to protect reproductive rights. Armintor, in turn, reached out to Maguire, who pitched a similar resolution to the council at an early June work session.

“She is bringing the heat on all of our families. And that makes no sense to me. People are upset about that [the overturn of Roe v. Wade], and they’re going to Supreme Court justices’ houses, and they have federal agents there. We don’t have that.

“And you’re giving people false hope,” he added. “You are inciting people. But all our families, the home addresses are known. That’s a concern for me.”

Novak told the council their meetings are business meetings and exist to do city business.

“And to the degree that you allow national issues to come to your local meetings, you are politicizing a process that is about being a board of directors and making business decisions,” she said.

“Have you read the resolution that the mayor is referring to?” asked Maguire. “It’s about local police enforcement.”

“So directing the police not to enforce the law of the land?” asked Novak.

“I don’t think it is appropriate for you to tell the council what is and isn’t appropriate to bring forward,” Maguire said.

“The problem,” Hudspeth said, “is we put city staff and our families in danger and unnecessarily so.”

Watts, the former mayor who now represents District 6, wondered why the council didn’t have an at-length discussion about the resolution before they put it on the agenda. He said he also had a problem with telling the police how to do their jobs.

Davis, the District 3 council member, agreed with Hudspeth and Novak that the council should operate like a board of directors because they have a lot of subject matter to cover.

“In my experience, there is a minority group of people in the community that believes that the City Council has a moral duty to speak out about certain things, to be taking on some of these issues, to be in my words ‘a baby Congress,’ because, in their view, the Legislature has failed to act on something or the national government has failed to act on something,” Davis said.

The rally

At the rally shortly before Tuesday’s council meeting, a news helicopter hovered over the downtown area while news reporters, police and several hundred people arrived for the planned 6 p.m. rally in support of Maguire’s resolution.

A group of black-clad people in ninja masks, carrying military-style rifles, arrived and lingered at the back of the crowd. They said they were part of an organization but refused to identify which organization. They claimed they were in support of the resolution.

“We don’t talk to the press,” one member said.

A small group of anti-abortion counterprotesters arrived with a megaphone to share a message normally associated with acceptance, love and tolerance. Supporters of the resolution soon surrounded them and continued their chants. “Say no to Christian Fascism,” “Vote yes for Item F” and “F--k Greg Abbott” were a few of the chants shouted.

Nearly a dozen police officers lingered together in the crowd. Davis had announced shortly after the council meeting began at 6:30 p.m. that the police had arrested someone for assault and thanked them for helping to keep the rally peaceful.

Inside the council chambers, even more police officers gathered, checking bags and using metal detector wands. It was an unusual sight and brought ire from one resident who complained during the comment period about the cost to taxpayers.

Throughout the night, the council chamber was at fire code capacity with about 147 people inside for most of the meeting while supporters gathered along the back and the side steps with signs. Some of the signs read: “I’m a woman not a womb,” “My body, my choice” and “Prolife is a lie. Women will suffer and die.”

Night’s end

Shortly before the meeting began, Maguire addressed supporters outside about the upcoming resolution and its limitations. “We don’t have legal authority to explicitly set [police] department policy. But we absolutely can make recommendations and as leaders in this community, we have the responsibility to do so.”

Around 8 p.m., the council allowed people to comment on the resolution. Several people had shown up to ask council not to pass the resolution, mentioning that they thought police should enforce the law and pointing out what they called the horrors of abortion, though they weren’t describing first-trimester abortions.

Many others shared what would they feared would happen now with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and described their tragic sexual assaults, which they couldn’t get prosecuted; some spoke about trying to carry a baby to term only to discover horrible congenital disorders like missing limbs, a hole in the heart, brain development problems.

One commenter had to travel to New Mexico to get an abortion when she found about the birth defects affecting her child due to Texas’ abortion laws that limit later-term abortions.

Others pointed out that although the resolution wouldn’t prevent all law enforcement in North Texas from investigating women who seek abortions, Denton could set a precedent for other cities to enact their own resolutions to protect reproductive rights.

When it came time to vote, each council member discussed why they supported or didn’t support the resolution. Davis and Watts reiterated what they said at the council retreat. McGee surprised everyone with his decision to support it.

Hudspeth, on the other hand, was visibly upset. The mayor delved into the oaths that council members take to support the law and then pointed out that no one had seen in advance the minor corrections that had been made on the resolution. He also made several references to defunding the police, which wasn’t what the resolution does, according to several council members.

At one point, Maguire asked to speak again before the vote. Hudspeth wasn’t going to allow it. Maguire told the mayor nothing prevented her from speaking. So the council took whether Maguire could speak to a vote.

The mayor was the only dissenting vote.

Shortly after the council voted to approve the resolution, Maguire voted to approve the ordinance for her recall election. All voted in favor of holding it in November — unless a judge rules that the petition for her recall is invalid because redistricting lines don’t go into effect until Maguire’s and Davis’ terms are up.

“We’ll let the court decide,” Maguire said.

Several council members pointed out that their votes to hold the recall election weren’t in support of recalling Maguire and that they would have to let a judge decide what the vague amendment to the ordinance about recall elections in regards to redistricting lines means.