As newly sworn-in President Donald Trump began issuing executive orders to enable what he promises will be the most massive deportation in American history, undocumented immigrants, their California families and local officials are bracing for the administration’s new policies.
One of Trump's immigration orders yesterday also threatened to pull federal money from "sanctuary jurisdictions" that limit collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration agencies.
CalMatters reports a third of California's budget relies on federal dollars.
Trump has long derided California for declaring itself a "sanctuary state" for undocumented immigrants. It’s a move the Democratic-controlled Legislature made 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, such as felony drunk driving. It also allows California state prisons to regularly coordinate with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, about upcoming release dates for prisoners eligible for deportation.
During the first Trump administration, California went to court to oppose the President’s intent to withhold a few federal grants from the state for its failure to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In 2018, a federal judge ruled in California's favor, saying the president's directive was unconstitutional.
In another case, among the exhaustive list of California legal challenges to the first Trump administration, the University of California in 2020 prevailed in a suit that preserved the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The program's purpose: to shield from deportation immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.
