By Wendy Fry. CalMatters via Bay City News.
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Undocumented immigrants and their families in California braced for the worst — and many told CalMatters they would go into hiding — as newly sworn-in President Donald Trump began issuing executive orders to allow for what he promises will be the largest deportation in U.S. history.
“It takes a lot of my energy to think about what’s going to happen and not know exactly what’s going to happen to me, my family and my daughters,” said Frank, a northeast Los Angeles resident who asked to be identified only by his first name because of his ongoing immigration case.
Advocates reported hearing from parents who were considering keeping their children home from school this week. Some neighbors said they will send their children out to buy groceries and run errands, so they can stay indoors most of the time.
“I plan to stay very local, no unnecessary travel, and thank God my job is close to home,” said Frank, a restaurant cook who came to this country without federal authorization from El Salvador about 20 years ago.
Kathleen, his wife of seven years and a U.S. citizen, called the situation “scary” and said she was worried about him and “what I would have to deal with and having to raise our children on my own.”
In his inaugural address, President Trump previewed a series of executive orders that he began implementing later in the day. On Monday evening, he officially declared a national emergency on the southern border that “requires the use of the Armed Forces” — a move for which he can expect to face legal hurdles.
“All illegal entries will be stopped immediately, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to where they came from,” Trump continued in his inaugural address, without giving details yet on how he might miraculously end all illegal entries. His tally of aliens with criminal convictions is far higher than reported by federal immigration authorities.
The Republican president also said he plans to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy in place during his first term, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings to present their immigration cases.
“I will end the practice of ‘catch and release’ and send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” he continued.
Unsurprisingly, he issued an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. “And by invoking the Foreign Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign criminal gangs and networks…” he said.
And he signed another order to revoke birthright citizenship, the right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution that guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the country or its territories, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. Trump wants the Supreme Court to reinterpret the provision. A legal challenge is a certainty.
As dusk fell on the West Coast, several hundred protesters began marching from San Diego’s Balboa Park to the Courthouse, chanting, “When immigrant lives are under attack, what do we do? We stand up and fight back!”
“I’m worried about the migrants because this is going to be very hard in the next four years. It was hard before, too, when Trump was in power the last time. It was crazy for us there on the border and we expect the same or worse now,” said Alejandro Ortigoza, 50, leader of Armadillos Search and Rescue, a group that goes out into the desert to search for the remains of missing migrants.
Yet even as the new president declared a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border, people living there largely continued with business as usual.
Lighter-than-normal foot traffic continued through the eastbound crosswalk at San Ysidro as people calmly made their way to the trolley under the familiar sound of a helicopter circling overhead.
In the parking lot of the Home Depot in Imperial Beach, day laborers gathered as usual, looking for odd jobs to help San Diegans move or clean their yards. They said they cross the border every day from their homes in Tijuana and didn’t expect Trump’s executive orders to affect them much. Still, several planned to carry documents proving they are naturalized U.S. citizens wherever they went.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Juan, a 60-year-old man from Sinaloa, Mexico, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Tijuana and crosses the border daily for work. “It’s not convenient for the United States or for Mexico to close the border. It won’t benefit either country.”
“I think Trump is very racist… and he is not right in the head,” he added.
Juan declined to give his last name for fear of retaliation or harassment for sharing his negative opinion of the president. He keeps proof of his legal status handy. “I always carry my certificate, which says I’m naturalized, wherever I go. I always have it in my backpack.”
Saul Muñoz, a 53-year-old construction worker who lives in the Otay area of Tijuana, predicted an increase in human rights violations under the Trump administration.
“If they kick out all the undocumented immigrants, then yes, we will have more work, but they will want to pay us the same as before, they will want to pay us less,” said Muñoz. “So, really, who will benefit?”
“Under the Trump administration, we will see horrors in terms of the attacks that immigrant communities will experience. President Trump will put 5.1 million American citizen children at risk of family separation,” said Kerri Talbot, co-executive director of Immigration Hub, a national immigrant advocacy group based in DC.
The most recent New York Times/Ipsos poll of Americans, conducted in early January, found that 55% strongly or somewhat support mass deportations of people living in the United States without authorization.
Public support for deportation was even stronger in certain circumstances: 87% of respondents supported deporting those who “are here illegally and have a criminal record,” and 63% supported removing those who are “here illegally and arrived in the last four years.”
But only 41% of respondents supported ending “birthright citizenship for children of immigrants who are here illegally,” and only 34% wanted to end deportation protections for “immigrants who were children when they entered the country illegally.”
It’s not as if Trump’s actions on Monday hadn’t been announced well in advance: During the election campaign, he repeatedly promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. Late last week, Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, told Fox News that large-scale raids were scheduled to begin as early as Tuesday.
“There will be major raids all over the country. Chicago is just one of many places,” said Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “On Tuesday, ICE is expected to… ICE will finally go out and do their job. We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them arrest ‘criminal aliens.’ That’s what’s going to happen.”
The administration's plans are likely to face significant legal challenges and logistical hurdles, including the challenge of housing millions of detainees before they can be expelled.
California threatened with federal funding withdrawal… again
One of Trump’s immigration orders on Monday also threatened to withdraw federal money from “sanctuary jurisdictions” that limit collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration agencies.
One-third of California's budget depends on federal dollars.
“The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security will evaluate and take, to the extent possible under law, appropriate legal action to ensure that so-called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions that seek to interfere with the lawful exercise of federal law enforcement operations do not receive access to federal funds,” an order says. “In addition, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security will evaluate and take any other legal action, criminal or civil, that they deem warranted based on such jurisdictions’ practices that interfere with federal law enforcement.”
The returning president has long ridiculed California for declaring itself a “sanctuary state” for undocumented immigrants — a move the Democratic-controlled legislature took during his first term — but the reality is more nuanced. Known here as the California Values Act, the law exempts from its protections people convicted of violent crimes or serious offenses like drunk driving, for example, and allows California state prisons to regularly coordinate with ICE on upcoming release dates for prisoners eligible for deportation.
California went to court during Trump's first term to reject his attempt to withhold some federal grants from the state over its failure to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In 2018, a federal judge ruled in California's favor, saying the president's move was unconstitutional.
In December, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted 3-1 to prohibit county agencies from using local resources to assist federal immigration enforcement, including cooperating with ICE. But San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez said she will not comply with the county’s new policy, saying the county board does not set policies for her department.
Days before Christmas, a conservative organization led by Trump adviser Stephen Miller sent letters to California leaders and former San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas warning they could go to prison over sanctuary policies that protect undocumented residents.
Homan has said he plans to target not just people with criminal records, but anyone who might be nearby.
“They’re going to focus on the worst first, the threats to public safety. But nobody is off the table. If they’re in the country illegally, they have a problem,” Homan said on Fox News this weekend.
In San Diego, local organizations have been holding private “Know Your Rights” events in the months since Trump was elected.
Gina Amato Lough, managing attorney of the Public Counsel Immigrant Rights Project in Los Angeles, stressed that constitutional rights apply to everyone, whether they are in the country legally or not.
“I think it’s very important for people to exercise their constitutional rights,” she said. “If you’re at home and ICE shows up at your door, you don’t have to open the door.”
In another case that is among California’s exhaustive list of legal challenges to the first Trump administration, the University of California in 2020 prevailed in a lawsuit preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The program’s purpose: to protect from deportation immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
Economic impact
Trump’s executive orders are expected to have financial and economic impacts, costing billions of dollars and disrupting local communities, and will do little to address the real challenges of immigration, advocates warned. Advocates and academics warned that Trump’s promised policies will ultimately weaken the country by undermining the contributions of immigrant communities.
“From an economic standpoint, the entire country will be deeply and negatively affected,” said Cecilia Menjívar, a sociology professor at UCLA. “I think it’s very important to recognize that we’re not just talking about undocumented immigrants. Legal permanent residents, naturalized citizens, all immigrant workers, all immigrants, all foreign-born, make vital contributions to critical sectors of the entire economy of the country: health care, services, hospitality, child care, elder care, high technology, etc.”
“The most important thing for California is disaster recovery: it is immigrants who clean up and rebuild,” Menjívar added.
The California Welcoming Task Force, a binational coalition of immigration organizations active in the border region, estimated that deporting 7 to 8 million undocumented workers in the United States would exacerbate the already worsening labor shortage.
“The impact on numerous industries, including construction, agriculture, healthcare and hospitality, would be catastrophic,” the group wrote in an email Monday. “A deportation effort on this scale would also cost hundreds of billions of dollars in California alone, with millions more spent annually to fund immoral and unsafe detention camps.”
On the southern side of the border
On Sunday, at a protest in the Mexican city of Tijuana, activists hung anti-Trump signs and a Trump piñata along the border wall in Playas de Tijuana. Earlier, students from the Autonomous University of Baja California in Ensenada painted hearts and messages of love and acceptance on the border wall's steel bollards.
Trump ended CBP One, a Biden administration mobile app that allows migrants outside the U.S. to request an asylum appointment at a port of entry. CBS News reported that about 270,000 migrants are waiting in northern Mexico hoping to get an appointment or schedule one before Trump ends the program.
Border experts have warned that cutting off their legal path could lead to a surge in irregular crossings. During the last Trump administration, makeshift camps formed along the border as migrants waiting to cross into the United States grew increasingly desperate, lacking food, water and shelter and targeted by criminal groups in northern Mexico. That led to a surge in people making more desperate attempts to cross the border in more dangerous ways.
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