“Nothing will stop us from deporting migrant criminals,” President-elect Donald Trump’s new “border czar,” Tom Homan, told Fox News on Monday.
The city of Los Angeles plans to try to stop them, and not for the first time. In 2017, the city and county of L.A. provided a combined $5 million to the newly launched “L.A. Justice Fund,” dedicated to providing free legal assistance to detained immigrants facing deportation proceedings. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti admitted that individuals with a criminal record would be receiving help from taxpayers.
At the time, an estimated 3,700 people in the greater Los Angeles area were incarcerated and awaiting deportation.
On Tuesday, as Trump prepares to take office again, the L.A. City Council was set to vote on an ordinance that formally makes Los Angeles a sanctuary from the enforcement of federal immigration law.
Council member Nithya Raman told CBS News Los Angeles that the new ordinance goes further than a similar executive order signed by Garcetti. Not only will the ordinance “prevent federal immigration enforcement from being able to access city facilities or to use city resources in the pursuit of immigration enforcement,” but it also “prohibits certain kinds of data sharing that have also proven to be damaging.”
Damaging to whom?
On November 5, voters voiced their outrage over crime by throwing out “progressive” criminal justice reformers George Gascón and Pamela Price, district attorneys of Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, respectively. Statewide, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36 to modify the Gascón-authored Proposition 47 passed in 2014, and to allow prosecutors and judges to get tough on repeat offenders.
Of course, Trump promised to do more than just deport criminals. He has vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, and he has said he will declare a national emergency in order to do it. Under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, the president has enhanced powers to respond to a crisis, subject to oversight by Congress. Potentially, Trump could use the U.S. military for law enforcement, expedite deportation proceedings, change immigration enforcement, and possibly use economic controls to freeze assets or limit remittances from persons in the U.S. to other countries.
If these tools are deployed against criminal cartels operating at the border and within the U.S., Trump is likely to face little opposition, and he may have broad public support. A Scripps News poll in September found that a majority of Americans support “the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.”
One consequence of Trump’s election is the sudden reporting of numbers, actual data, on how many undocumented immigrants are living in the U.S. and would be affected by the policy change.
This month the American Immigration Council estimated the current number to be between 11 and 14 million people, claiming that the cost of deportation would exceed $315 billion.
The California Immigrant Data Portal reports that in 2021, there were 5.75 million people living in the Golden State who are undocumented immigrants or lived in a household with undocumented family members. An estimated 1.9 million lived in Los Angeles County, population 10 million.
And that was before the open-borders policy of the Biden administration enabled millions more people to enter the United States. The Border Patrol reported 2.2 million encounters with migrants in 2022 and 2 million more in 2023.
What is the cost to taxpayers?
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Consider health care. Los Angeles County created a free health insurance program specifically for low-income undocumented residents not eligible for other government health insurance. MyHealthLA cost county taxpayers more than $50 million annually until it was ended this year, and only because the state made all low-income undocumented immigrants eligible for full health insurance under the Medi-Cal program.
Undocumented immigrants are also entitled to free public education. The Los Angeles Unified School District says roughly 1 in 5 students are classified as English-learners. They’re not necessarily undocumented immigrants, but on Tuesday the school board frantically passed an emergency resolution reaffirming sanctuary policies.
Election returns and exit polls make clear that Trump’s plans for border security, immigration enforcement and mass deportations enjoy broad public support. We’re about to see “Operation Ruby Slippers” send a lot of people home. The Trump administration’s message to California? Deal with it, Dorothy.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley