Lawmakers in the Capital of Texas voted Thursday to restrict the city from doing business with companies who bid on President Trump’s wall project.

The City of Austin passed a policy 10-1 blacklisting certain companies, in a resolution which calls the wall a “damaging symbol of fear and division.”

President Trump’s plan to “build a physical wall along the entire international border between the United States and Mexico, (is) in direct conflict with the core values” of the United States, the resolution says, citing text from the Statue of Liberty.

“It is the policy of the city council, to the best of its ability, not to procure services from any company involved in the design, construction, or maintenance of the border wall,” the resolution states.

Council Member Delia Garza, the resolution’s main sponsor, has said she believed the wall was merely political campaign rhetoric and “would not make Texas or any other state safer, or reduce crime.”

The rhetoric “coupled with the president’s description of Mexicans as criminals and rapists, is extremely offensive to me as I am Mexican-American,” Garza said.

Doing business with a company that bid on the wall would send the wrong message to the immigrant community and Mexico, claimed Garza.

“I thought it was important to send a message to our community that we support them and we are welcoming, and we can choose not to do business with a company that I would think is not a good community partner,” Garza said.

“In Austin we build bridges, not walls,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said.

An agenda item on Thursday’s action notes said the council would “develop a policy to apply the City’s stated opposition to such a wall through use of the City’s contracting policies and procedures.”

City Council Putting Lives, Safety of Residents at Risk

Stephen Neusch, president of Black Security Products, LLC, the only Austin company to submit a wall bid, told Infowars the policy is merely a symbolic representation of the city’s opposition to Trump.

“It’s political. It’s them trying to go against Trump and the right’s agenda, which I think they’re stepping out of bounds,” Neusch told Infowars.

“It’s ridiculous honestly, they’re playing games,” Neusch said, adding most of his contracts come from the federal government, not the city.

“They’re saying, ‘You can’t work for us if you work for the federal government, because we don’t like the federal government.’ That makes no sense.”

Neusch said council members were putting Austin residents’ safety at risk by passing such a resolution.

“What we do as security companies, we keep people from getting run over by cars. We stop that from happening. We put up vehicle barriers that prevent people from doing that. And they’re saying they don’t want to work with the only company in Austin that does that, therefore hurting the security of the people of Austin because they have a beef with Trump and the wall… makes no sense,” Neusch said.

“They’re cutting off their nose to spite their face.”

Attorney Tyler Nixon says the federal government would have the option to limit federal funds to Austin if the city prohibits companies from taking up federal contracts.

“If you are taking any federal money, you forfeit it if you spend ANY locally-collected taxpayer monies on any program or service that uses a federal contractor exclusion of any kind in determining the winning bid or contractor,” Nixon wrote in a letter to Infowars.

The owner of another Texas company that bid on the wall, PennaGroup from Fort Worth, said last May he’d received death threats for submitting a proposal.

“We’ve been getting a lot of death threats,” PennaGroup owner Michael Evangelista-Ysasaga told KTRK. “I’m Latino and this is a Latino-owned company and we weren’t sure whether or not we wanted to enter into this project because there was a lot of political controversy around it.”

Texas Sterling Construction Co. of Houston was among four businesses from across the country that won a contract to build a wall prototype last September.

DHS Deputy Secretary Elaine Duke opposed the resolution at an annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio Wednesday, saying “blackballing” companies is something “we shouldn’t be tolerating.”

“This is a democracy and a free country,” Duke said.

If approved, Austin would join dozens of other cities adopting similar bans, including Flagstaff, Tucson and San Diego.

Update: Article amended to reflect City of Austin passed resolution 10-1.

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