Trump and immigrants: Wide fear of deportations in Bay Area, but how will it work?

By David DeBolt and Matthew Artz
November 18, 2016
As seen in:
The Mercury News
Marinij

To achieve his goal of deporting two to three million immigrants with criminal records, President-elect Donald Trump would have to go after hundreds of thousands of people in California, including some with green cards who have minor convictions on their records, immigration, and legal experts say.

High in hyperbole but short on details, Trump’s plan raises many more questions than it answers, but immigrant advocates are girding for a crisis, urging potential deportees to meet with lawyers now and make “safety plans.

And perhaps nowhere in the country would the plan meet more resistance than California and the Bay Area, where state and local leaders say they will defy Trump's demands that they drop so-called "sanctuary" policies or face cuts in federal aid. 

It is unclear how a Trump Administration would identify the “criminal records, gang members, drug dealers” that Trump told 60 Minutes in his first post-Election interview would be rounded up. But to reach those numbers, legal permanent residents would likely have to be targeted alongside hard-core lawbreakers, people with knowledge of the deportation system said.

“We are talking about a grandmother who might have been caught with a single marijuana plant once,” said Elisa Della-Piana, the San Francisco legal director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, a non-profit that works in poor and immigrant communities. “He’s cutting with a really broad stroke. It’s causing a great amount of fear that families will be torn apart.”

Federal law already allows the deportation of legal permanent residents with even minor convictions, such as possessing a small amount of drugs, or petty theft, said UC Berkeley law professor Leti Volpp.

“There has been a lot of criticism of how the criminal grounds (for deportation) have broadened over time, sweeping in minor offenses,” said Volpp, who specializes in immigration law. 

A Department of Homeland Security report between 2011-13 found that about 1.9 million legal and illegal immigrants across the U.S. had committed crimes that qualified for deportation proceedings.

President Barack Obama was widely criticized by immigration advocates as “Deporter In Chief” after his first term when deportations rose to record levels of more than 400,000 immigrants in 2012. But the Obama Administration softened its approach, dramatically cutting deportations in his second term under policies that protected millions of children brought to the country illegally and many of their parents. 

The Pew Research Center estimates about 2.4 million illegal immigrants live in California, where they can obtain driver’s licenses and social services while living under sanctuary policies in communities that don’t question their immigration status.

“We are more committed than ever to being a sanctuary city and making sure our residents know that this is a protection we will defend,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said this week in response to questions from this news organization.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said providing sanctuary to the downtrodden and oppressed “is in the (city’s) DNA,” and Santa Clara County Supervisor David Cortese said the county will not cooperate with the incoming administration. “We don’t want our Department of Corrections incarcerating people on behalf of the president or anybody else,” Cortese said.

Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia said Thursday he wants the county to sever a contract with the federal government to house people at a jail in Richmond who are going through the deportation process. It is one of four holding facilities between Bakersfield and Oregon. Sheriff David Livingston, however, said he has no intention to cut the contract.

A spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown said the state “will continue to protect the rights of all people in California, including immigrants.”  And Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom called for all UC, CSU and community colleges to be designated “sanctuary campuses” where students “can pursue a higher education without fear of Mr. Trump’s proposed deportation force.”

But critics of sanctuary cities and campuses welcomed Trump’s plan. Joe Guzzardi, a spokesman for the group Californians for Population Stabilization, called for the new administration to “prosecute uncooperative sanctuary city officials that continue to defy federal immigration law. Harboring criminal aliens puts innocent citizens at risk, and the practice should be ended immediately.”

So far, Trump’s only threat is to punish communities by withholding federal funding. Cities across the Bay Area rely on federal funding to help serve low income residents, build affordable housing, retrain workers, provide preschool for poor students and, in some cases, pay for police officers.

In Oakland, documents show the city receives more than $130 million in ongoing and one-time grants from Uncle Sam in its current fiscal year, for everything from school lunches for poor kids to seismic retrofitting to cops in the street. San Jose officials say the city received $78 million in federal funding this year.

San Francisco’s well-known position as a sanctuary city raised the ire of critics across the country last year after a Mexican national who had been deported five times was arrested in the shooting death of Kate Steinle, fueling Trump’s hard line on immigration just as his campaign for president took off.

The shooter, Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, was scheduled Tuesday to go to trial next year. His lawyers have repeatedly said the July 1, 2015, shooting was an accident. A ballistics expert who testified at a preliminary hearing last year said the gun was pointed downward when it fired and the bullet ricocheted about 75 feet before striking Steinle in the back as she walked along a pier with her father.

Weeks after the killing, Steinle’s parents traveled to Washington to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, imploring Congress to take action.

“It’s unbelievable to see so many innocent Americans that have been killed by undocumented immigrant felons in the recent years,” Jim Steinle told the committee. “Our family realized the complexity of immigration laws; however, we feel strongly that some legislation should be discussed, enacted or changed to take these undocumented immigrant felons off our streets for good.”

With a second grade education and “severely limited English,” Lopez Sanchez has little grasp of his impact on national politics or even who Trump is, his lead public defender, Matt Gonzalez, said Tuesday. “He’s asked why his picture is on TV all the time. He has a vague understanding, more confusion than anything.”

Whether he is acquitted or eventually serves prison time, Lopez Sanchez will eventually be deported, Gonzales said. But, like all deportees, he’ll first be entitled to a hearing in federal Immigration Court.

Inmates and people with criminal records are entitled to due process before the U.S. can throw them out of the country, so Trump simply cannot empty prisons of illegal immigrants and give them the boot, said Stanford Law School Professor Jayashri Srikantiah, who runs the university’s Immigrants Rights Clinic.

Immigration courts are already teeming with people going through the deportation process, Srikantiah said. Although it seems like a criminal matter, it is actually a civil proceeding. That means people flagged as deportees have no right to a court-appointed lawyer to take on the government in their defense. Some never see an attorney before being put on a plane.

The San Francisco Bar Association runs a program where volunteer lawyers attend court and help unrepresented people with preliminary matters, but they don’t argue their cases to stay in the country, said Avantika Shastri, a lawyer who runs the program and volunteers for court duty.

California leads the country in immigration court cases, followed by Texas. People facing deportation in cases originating anywhere between Bakersfield and Oregon end up at two small federal court facilities in San Francisco’s financial district where about 20 judges decide what happens to potential deportees. Combined with Immigration Courts in Southern California, there is a backlog of 96,000 cases in the state, which is about 18 percent of all cases nationally, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

But until Trump announces details of how he would move millions of people through the deportee system, all that can be done is plan and worry, she and other advocates said.

“We are all in this world,” said Stanford’s Srikantiah, “where we just don’t know what he is going to do.”

Staff writers David DeBolt and Matthew Artz contributed to this story.