Strict border policies will endure
Trump’s actions to limit immigration will be felt in California long after his attacks and his tenure end.
WASHINGTON — It was a Monday morning in Washington three weeks from the November presidential election and on the f irst day of Senate hearings for his Supreme Court pick, with more than 210,000 Americans having died from COVID- 19, President Trump tweeted:
“California is going to hell. Vote Trump!”
For nearly four years, California has been among Trump’s favorite punching bags, in large part due to clashes over his central 2016 campaign promise: to restrict immigration.
It’s a pledge he’s made good on in ways that will be felt in the state long after his tenure ends.
Trump’s more than 400 executive actions to restrict immigration have had an outsize impact on the Golden State.
He has targeted the Silicon Valley- based tech industry by squeezing high- skilled foreign labor and has restricted immigration based on family reunification even as he’s separated thousands of migrant families at the border.
He has attempted to repeal federal protections for “Dreamers,” young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, and has sidestepped the Supreme Court’s rejection of his plans. California has more residents covered by those protections, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, than any other state. He has also ended temporary protected status for refugees from El Salvador and other Central American countries, a disproportionate number of whom live in the state.
And his administration has discouraged thousands of other students, refugees, asylum seekers, workers and entrepreneurs — many headed to California — from coming to the United States at all, most recently by using the COVID- 19 pandemic as a justification for largely clos
ing the nation’s borders.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has pledged to reverse course if he defeats Trump in this year’s election. But the Democrat has taken specific stands on only some immigration issues while pledging to work with Congress to find unspecified solutions to others that, in some cases, have defied legislative compromise for decades.
Even if a Biden administration did find solutions, he would inherit an immigration system that has been battered during Trump’s tenure and that faces a ballooning backlog of cases. And some of the effects of Trump’s policies would be difficult to erase.
The most tangible effect may be the fear and uncertainty that Trump’s rhetoric and raids have created among immigrants in California, leaving many in years- long limbo and limiting opportunities.
Under President Obama, people were skeptical of local police involvement in immigration enforcement, but Trump has “greatly magnif ied” the concerns, said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor at UCLA School of Law.
“To really separate out local law enforcement from immigration — that’s a major thing that will survive past Trump,” he said.
California has taken the lead in opposition to many of Trump’s immigration policies, notably in his administration’s attempts to do away with DACA. The University of California was a lead plaintiff in the case that went to the Supreme Court. The system’s president, Janet Napolitano, had crafted the DACA policy as Obama’s Homeland Security secretary.
State Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, the son of Mexican immigrants and the f irst Latino to serve as the state’s top lawyer, says he has sued the Trump administration more than 100 times, often over immigration issues.
“I never expected to have to sue the president,” Becerra said. “We don’t sue Donald Trump because it’s easy or fun.... If he wouldn’t break the law, we wouldn’t take him to court.”
Biden has pledged to work with Congress for a permanent legislative replacement for DACA, as well as a path to citizenship for the rest of the estimated 10.5 million immigrants in the U. S. illegally. He also says he would change American foreign policy toward Mexico and Central America, with more emphasis on diplomacy and less on enforcement. And Biden says he would end the use of forprofit migrant detention centers, which have proliferated under Trump.
Biden has not endorsed the calls from some progressives to dissolve the Homeland Security Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in particular, saying instead that he’d increase training and oversight.
The Democratic candidate says he would tackle the backlog of immigration cases by increasing the number of immigration judges, court staff and interpreters. But with promises to end policies such as “Remain in Mexico,” he’d have to confront the claims of tens of thousands of asylum seekers stuck south of the border under Trump, as well as those who have already been waiting years to have their claims heard.
For state officials, the biggest impact of a change of administrations might be no longer being the constant foil for Trump’s political attacks.
Trump has been railing against California’s cities and their immigration policies since his f irst presidential campaign. Last year, he threatened to dump detained migrants into “sanctuary cities and states,” despite his own advisors telling him that would be illegal.
“California certainly is always saying, ‘ Oh, we want more people,’ ” Trump said. “And they want more people in their sanctuary cities. Well, we’ll give them more people.... Let’s see if they’re so happy.”
This month, Chad Wolf, Trump’s acting Homeland Security secretary, and Tony H. Pham, interim director of ICE, held an unusual news conference in Washington about immigration enforcement actions in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco — chosen, the officials said, because they are socalled sanctuary cities.
“Sanctuary” jurisdictions in California — like others across the country — have vowed to protect people who are in the country illegally. The state provides some benefits for people who lack legal status, including healthcare and driver’s licenses. And a law signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown limited cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration agents.
ICE’s latest enforcement push, dubbed “Operation Rise,” resulted in the arrest of 128 immigrants, Wolf and Pham said. It’s a relatively small number for an agency that averaged nearly 400 arrests a day last year.
Wolf said the timing of the news conference had no tie to the election.
“Nearly four years ago this administration put forth an ‘ America first’ strategy with a clear mandate to secure our borders,” he said. “Unfortunately, certain local political leaders, including many in California, continue to put politics over public safety.”
He told California residents to “continue to expect a more visible ICE presence.”
Tom Wong, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego who was an immigration advisor to the Obama White House, called such statements an example of the administration’s political “theater” on immigration.
Wong’s research using federal data showed less crime in so- called sanctuary communities relative to comparable areas.
“The facts do not support the administration theater when it comes to this image of sanctuary localities as being lawless and rampant,” Wong said.
Beyond the rhetorical broadsides, the administration has taken several steps that have been acutely felt by immigrant communities.
One of Trump’s early executive orders made every immigrant in the country illegally a priority for arrest, in contrast with Obama’s focus on arresting those with criminal records.
More recently, invoking the pandemic, Trump officials have sought to deny hearings before a judge to speed up the removal of immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the country continuously for two years.
Overall, however, immigration arrests and removals by ICE have fallen under Trump — though the proportion of those deported without criminal records has more than doubled, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
As COVID- 19 led to widespread job loss and deaths, disproportionately borne by Latinos and Black Americans and hitting the agriculture, food- processing and healthcare sectors in California particularly hard, the administration insisted that Congress make millions of immigrants without legal status — as well as many of the 1.2 million Americans who filed taxes jointly with a noncitizen spouse — ineligible for federal stimulus checks.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren ( D- San Jose) said Trump ignores that immigrant workers in California’s economy play a key role nationally.
“California has the most productive farming in the U. S., and more than half of the farmworkers are undocumented,” Lofgren said. “If they weren’t there, our agriculture sector would collapse.”
The stimulus exclusion tracks with other “wealth test” policies the administration has put into place to keep low- income immigrants out of the country or to deny them citizenship. Under Trump, the government has adopted what’s known as a “public charge” rule, which would deny permanent legal status to those who might use, or whose U. S. citizen children might use, public benefits.
While these policies have been tied up in litigation, they have already had a chilling effect, discouraging thousands from using available benefits in California and other states.
The Trump administration has also sought to restrict citizenship in other ways, such as raising fees and slowing the processing of hundreds of thousands of potential 2020 voters waiting to be naturalized — most of them in California, according to a report by Boundless Immigration.
All of those policies have taken aim at California constituencies, Lofgren said.
“If you don’t love him, he tries to destroy you,” she said. “But it’s impossible to destroy the biggest state without harming the rest of the country tremendously.”