A panicked Somerville City Council, ready to reaffirm its sanctuary city status, is already strategizing on how to sidestep President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to deport migrants.

A city councilor who says he has experience helping immigrants avoid federal authorities prompted the city’s director of immigrant affairs to warn councilors “to tread with very light footing in these times.”

The council sent a resolution declaring its reaffirmation to its legislative affairs committee on Thursday, with approval slated for later this month. Somerville, a sanctuary city since 1987, has refused to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement over the decades since.

Councilor Jesse Clingan, speaking Thursday night about the resolution, recounted protecting immigrant residents during Trump’s previous presidency through what he called “back-channel activism.”

Clingan said the effort included working with the Welcome Project, a city-based immigrant advocacy organization, in 2017 to provide alerts when officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement might have been in the area.

He specifically spoke about seeing ICE waiting outside of the Somerville courthouse waiting to take individuals away during “those scary times.”

“Beyond what we can do legally,” Clingan said, “I encourage community members to stand together and band against this type of hate and these actions that are being taken against our community.”

Maria Teresa Nagel, the director of SomerViva, the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, said reaffirming the sanctuary status “sends a very loud message” that the city will block fear tactics that try to disrupt its commitment to immigrant residents.

Clingan’s comments, however, elicited Nagel to warn councilors to be “very careful with the strategies that we might want to share publicly.”

“We want to show support,” she said, “we want to be very strategic about what we communicate, but we also want to make sure the things we make public are not then used against our community.”

The resolution pledges that Somerville will continue to maintain a legal services stabilization fund that provides legal representation to residents facing deportation or removal.

It directs city departments, including police and schools, not to apply for or accept federal funds that require gathering or sharing information regarding national origin, immigration, or citizenship status for “the purpose of targeting or deportation.”

Somerville, of roughly 80,500 residents, nearly 24% of whom were born outside of the country, has been a sanctuary city since 1987, two years after neighboring Cambridge became the first Bay State municipality to enact the designation.

Six other municipalities scattered across the Bay State have enacted sanctuary provisions within the past decade: Amherst, Boston, Concord, Lawrence, Newton and Northampton.

Somerville City Councilor Lance Davis said he supported the resolution addressed Thursday but he requested amendments that tweaked its language with minor changes, such as acknowledging how the council reaffirmed the sanctuary status in 2019.

The director of immigrant affairs and councilors spoke about how they feel the city and county are headed into “very dark” and “troubling times” ahead with Trump’s return to the White House.

“The City of Somerville has a proud, longstanding history of welcoming and supporting generations of immigrants,” the resolution states, “and has continually upheld values of equity, inclusion, and support for all community members.”

“The national political climate remains increasingly hostile toward immigrants and refugees,” it adds, “and the recent return of the former President to the White House brings heightened risks for immigrant communities across the country.”

Council Vice President Judy Pineda Neufeld, the daughter of two immigrant parents, recounted telling her nephews in 2016 that they wouldn’t be deported and that they were safe because they were born in the United States.

“The rhetoric coming out of the campaign in 2016 was as hateful and hostile as we’re seeing today,” Pineda Neufeld said. “It really hit me that youth were going to bed in fear of what was going to happen to them and their families.”

Somerville’s conversation on its sanctuary designation follows Gov. Maura Healey’s pledge that Massachusetts State Police won’t be used to assist in Trump’s mass deportation efforts. The state’s top law enforcement agency has also declared that kind of support goes against its mission.

Under the sanctuary designation, the resolution states Somerville will “strongly advocate for schools, hospitals, places of worship, and courthouses to be recognized as ‘sensitive locations,’ safe from federal immigration enforcement actions, to ensure the fair and compassionate administration of justice.”

The resolution “also invites neighboring cities in Massachusetts to reaffirm their commitment to serving and protecting their immigrant communities, joining in solidarity to safeguard residents’ rights and safety.”

Councilor Naima Sait, an Algerian immigrant, said she felt “overwhelmed” after the election results, that she’d have to deal with an administration that has “historically shaken our community.”

In 2016, when teaching at Somerville High School, Sait said she worked mostly with first-generation immigrant families and that some parents were forced to leave the country.

“I saw fear in my students’ eyes every day,” she said. “I watched them fall behind on school work because they transitioned to taking on bigger roles in their families by becoming the primary provider, by being the one to seek legal services.”