Anti-Trump resisters take aim at sheriffs

Attention Democrats: Getting tired of email and text blasts urging you to call Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi three times a week? A growing corner of the anti-President Trump resistance hears you. So now they’re going to call you constantly urging you to focus on a political target that could provide a bigger return-on-investment for your activist time: your county sheriff.

Why sheriffs? Increasingly, they’re going to be at the center of the action when it comes to the immigration debate. And, unlike a minority

Democrat in Congress, they actually have the power to affect what happens in your community. And because 90 percent of American sheriffs are elected, they are — potentially — very responsive to voter pressure.

Like, say, a bunch of phone calls from voters.

“They never get called. It’s very unusual,” said Amelia Miazad, a cofounder of the new, Bay Area-based, 70,000member resistance group Wall-of-Us, which is among the organizations pointing its members toward sheriffs. “One hundred calls to your sheriff is like 10,000 calls to your member of Congress.”

Sheriffs are where it’s at these days. Trump has called for hiring 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enforce his new immigration-control measures, which include picking up the 2 million “criminal aliens” Trump estimates are in the country.

The trouble is, even Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly acknowledged there’s no way the federal government can hire that many people “within the next couple of years.” So that means that your local sheriff has to help out in rounding up and detaining immigrants in the country without documentation if it’s going to get done.

But here’s the political leverage: Sheriffs don’t have to do that.

“Sheriffs have legal latitude to not participate in an enforcement,” said Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of law and an immigration expert at Santa Clara University. “If a sheriff doesn’t want to, they don’t have to, according to the Constitution.”

Yes, Gulasekaram is advising Wall-of-Us, which is also co-founded by his fellow Santa Clara law Professor Colleen Chien.

There is also a practical, political aspect to the sheriff strategy. It’s a way to feed the voracious appetite of the new activists who have hopped onto the antiTrump train.

“We hear people tell us, ‘I just can’t call Pelosi again. I just can’t call (Massachusetts Sen.) Elizabeth Warren again,’ ” Miazad said.

Wall-of-Us surveyed 2,500 of its members and found those who were new to activism were trying an average of six different tactics (calling Congress, joining a march, etc.). And 8 percent had called their sheriff.

But guess who else is calling out your sheriff ? Trump.

This week, the Department of Homeland Security started publishing what it promises to be a weekly list of local law enforcement agencies that have declined to cooperate with the federal government’s request to detain immigrants in the country without permission. The first list, which included 118 municipalities, also includes a list of “sample crimes associated with those released individuals.”

“This important report demonstrates a clear and ongoing threat to public safety,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “It is not acceptable for jurisdictions to refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement by releasing criminal aliens back into our communities when our law required them to be deported.”

The National Sheriffs Association wouldn’t comment on the federal government’s request.

Activists find two problems with this approach. For one, Trump’s new immigration orders are written so broadly that anyone who is in this country illegally, even people who have not committed any crime for decades, can be kicked out. According to the order, the president also wants to deport “aliens” who “in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.”

And second, it continues to press the false impression that immigrants commit an inordinate amount of violent crime. In fact, they commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. About 1.6 percent of immigrant men between the ages of 18 are 39 are incarcerated compared with 3.3 percent of the Americans born here, according to an analysis of the American Community Survey by the American Immigration Council, which works to ensure that immigrants are treated fairly in court.

“This is part of the Trump administration’s agenda to keep fear in people’s eyes,” said Angie Junck, a supervising attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a policy group that works for better access to services for immigrants. “This fuels this fire of more hate toward immigrants.”

Californians definitely want a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are in this country without permission. A Public Policy Institute of California poll out Thursday found that 68 percent of all adults, including 46 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of independent voters, want a pathway for the undocumented. Only 15 percent say these immigrants should be ordered to leave.

But Californians also largely support local law enforcement, too. The same survey found roughly two-thirds of residents say police are doing either an excellent job (30 percent) or a good one (35 percent). But two-thirds also said that the criminal justice system does not treat African Americans and Latinos the same as whites.

Like many in the immigrant rights and civil rights communities, Junck has been focusing on sheriffs’ role in rounding up immigrants in the country without documentation for a decade. She welcomes the help from the resisters.

“Now the anti-Trump movement is understanding more about what we’re doing,” she said. “It’s elevating us to another level.”

The question will be whether that will be enough to hold their attention if things don’t change very soon.