Until recently, no one would have mistaken Arianna Barrios for a wokosa.
The Orange city council member comes from O.C. Republican royalty. Her grandfather, Cruz, was a Mexican immigrant and civil rights pioneer who registered with the GOP in the late 1940s after Democratic leaders wouldn’t help him and other activists fight school segregation against Mexican American students in Orange County. Her second cousin, Steve Ambriz, was a rising GOP star serving on the Orange City Council when he was killed by wrong-way driver in 2006.
The 55-year-old has helped Republicans on policy and handled communications for the Orange County Taxpayers Assn. and the Richard Nixon Foundation. Friendly, smart, quick-witted and a total goodie-goodie, she corrected me last fall when I introduced her to my Chapman University history students as a Republican. To my surprise, the Orange native proclaimed that she has never been a Republican — she started out as a Democrat and is now an independent.
And that’s not the first surprise she’s sprung on me. Her recent rise as one of O.C.’s most vocal politicians opposing President Trump’s deportation machine has been unexpected — and welcome.
She called out her council colleagues in July for not approving a resolution that would have required federal immigration agents to remove their masks and wear IDs within city limits. She connects young activists to legal and financial resources and has participated in neighborhood patrols alerting people that la migra is coming. She has accompanied Orange residents to hearings at Adelanto’s immigration court and hosted a two-part video series for the civic affairs group Orange County Forum on how the U.S. got to this moment in immigration.
Why, Barrios has become so radicalized that she used the hash tag #brownwar throughout the summer and into the fall when posting immigration-related stories on Facebook. That stopped after her husband, an anti-Trump Republican, suggested it was a bit much.
You would expect this of a politician from an O.C. city with a progressive streak, like Santa Ana, Anaheim or even Laguna Woods. But not from Orange, whose city fathers have long cast it as a slice of small-town Americana free from big-city problems or national issues.
And definitely not from Barrios, whose demeanor is usually more baseball mom than strident activist.
“I’ve been asked multiple times, ‘What’s up with Arianna? This is not her,’” said Orange Councilmember Ana Gutierrez, who has seen ICE agents invade her street twice. “Well, when she cares about something, she’s loud.”
Working with Barrios on pro-immigrant actions is “like talking to a young person,” said 20-year-old Chapman student Bianey Chavez, who belongs to a local youth activist group. The two connected at a protest in their hometown’s picturesque Orange Circle. “It’s fresh air for someone of her age and power to be so open-minded and helpful.”
Anaheim Councilmember Natalie Rubalcava, who has known Barrios for over a decade, said she had “never heard Arianna speak on any issue like this in the past. But it’s great. Maybe she just felt empowered at this point. Maybe anger just boiled up in her, and she couldn’t be quiet anymore.”
That’s exactly what happened, Barrios told me over breakfast at a Mexican café in Old Towne.
The immigration raids that have rocked Orange County as hard as L.A. “just hit all of those buttons,” she said. Wearing a blouse decorated with orange poppies, the bespectacled Barrios looked every bit the polite pol that O.C. leaders had taken her to be. “Not only is it just patently unfair, it’s just so wrong. And it’s so inhumane.
“And one of the things that I can’t stand — and one of things I taught my kids — is if you see a kid being bullied, my expectation of you is that you go up to that kid and you go protect them.”
She credits what her father jokes is “an overactive sense of justice” to her grandparents, who ran a corner store in Santa Ana in the 1940s. Barrios Market became a meeting place for the families who helped organize the 1946 lawsuit that ended Mexican-only schools in California.
Their granddaughter didn’t know any of that history until her 20s, because her upbringing in 1980s Orange County was “like a John Hughes movie.”
“We didn’t even really think of ourselves really as, like, Hispanic — I mean, we all were, but it wasn’t the end-all be-all,” Barrios said. “We were all trying to be Valley girls.”
Living in Nacogdoches, Texas, for a few years in the 1990s “woke her up” to anti-Latino racism. But after returning home to find county and state officials passing anti-immigrant laws, she didn’t join the resistance, as many Latinos of that era did. Instead, Barrios focused on starting on her career in communications and later raising two sons.
“I remember even having my own stereotypical thoughts about [illegal immigration], not really understanding what the experience was, how people got here,” she said.
Things began to change as Barrios worked for school districts “making sure that kids had access. I didn’t care about their status.” It became personal once she was appointed to the Rancho Santiago Community College District Board of Trustees in 2011 and met refugees as well as recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants a reprieve from deportation to some immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. She hired some at her PR firm.
The council member brought up the 1986 immigration amnesty that Ronald Reagan signed and an unsuccessful 2001 bill co-sponsored by the late U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that would have created a pathway to citizenship for people who came to this country without papers as minors.
“That’s what’s so odd about where we are right now,” Barrios said. “The two biggest programs, to get people to protected status and to legal resident status, came out from under Republicans.”
After winning another four-year term in 2024, Barrios figured she’d spend her time trying to fix Orange’s fiscal crisis, especially because she thought “so much of what [Trump] was promising on immigration was rhetoric.”
An onslaught of federal immigration raids in the L.A. area starting in June made her realize things would be different. What finally sparked her furor was when federal agents handcuffed U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla after he crashed a June news conference featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“All of this garbage about [Noem claiming], ‘I didn’t know who he was and he didn’t identify himself’ was bulls—,” she said. “It was just bulls—. But if you’re willing to do that, you’re willing to do anything. There are no limits.”
She admits to sometimes “los[ing] my cool” while speaking out against Trump and his deportation deluge, arguing it’s necessary to spark change in a place like Orange, which has a long history of anti-Latino sentiment. Within walking distance from her home is a former movie theater where Latinos were forced to sit in the balcony into the 1950s. In 2010, the City Council tried to ban day laborers and voted to support an Arizona law that made it legal for local law enforcement to question people about their immigration status.
It’s history Barrios knows and cites now but that barely registered with her back then.
“If people want to be nasty to me, I can’t stop them,” she said. “But I can try and explain where I’m coming from so that, as I told my sister once, it’s not for the person I’m talking to, it’s [for] everybody who’s watching the fight.”
Her husband — who joined her at a No Kings rally during the summer and will join her this weekend at one she helped organized — feels “nervous” about her newfound advocacy, she said.
But her late grandfather and her father, a Democrat who was the first Latino elected to the Orange Unified school board, wouldn’t have hesitated to protest against Trump’s cruelty, she said. “They wouldn’t even think twice about it.”
Barrios asked for a to-go box for her chorizo and eggs, which she barely touched during our hourlong chat. Then she reached into a cream-colored Kate Spade purse to pull out red cards.
“Know Your Rights,” they read, delineating what people can and can’t do if la migra asks them questions.
“I carry these all the time,” she said, leaving some on the table. “I see people and go, ‘Here you go. Just take some, OK?’”
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