The threat of mass deportations is real: Cities and counties must do more than reaffirm old sanctuary ordinances

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

One of the first actions we Californians took after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win was to adopt sanctuary ordinances. We in Santa Cruz County and our cities of Santa Cruz and Watsonville adopted sanctuary ordinances in 2017, as did Monterey and Santa Clara counties and many other cities and counties across the state. Now, in the wake of the recent elections, public jurisdictions like ours are dusting off and reaffirming those measures. 

These sanctuary ordinances affirm that our communities will not cooperate with excessive immigration enforcement. They were a step forward back in 2017, after a decade when county sheriffs and, indirectly, city police aided the Obama-era dragnet called, perversely, “Secure Communities.” That program flagged people possibly eligible for deportation as they were processed in our jails, including many with dependent families and no criminal convictions, and held them for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE) to pick up.

As a sociologist with decades of experience in the immigrant communities of the Central Coast, I helped city and county leaders draft those local ordinances in 2017. And I do believe it is time now to reaffirm them.  

But it is also time to do more.  

In fact, our local communities are already preparing to do more, as are others across the state and nation. 

Already, here as elsewhere, we are working together to teach people at risk of deportation to exercise their rights in any encounter with ICE, to equip families with contingency plans to care for children affected by the arrest and detention of caregivers, to prepare to sound the alarm and rapidly respond to monitor and nonviolently protest ICE incursions, and to activate the spirit of sanctuary within our faith communities and in our community as a whole.  

In these circumstances, however, local government, too, can and should do more. Local government should do more than stand by, while otherwise remaining passive when our neighbors are ripped away from their families.

What can local government do?

In response to this new era of profound threat to our neighbors and communities, we can amend our sanctuary ordinances to affirmatively support the families and individuals who are under attack; who are, in effect, victims of our own broken immigration system.

Ideally in my view, we should follow the lead of other California counties such as Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles to put into place a local office of immigrant and refugee affairs, with an expansive mandate to support inclusion in our diverse communities. 

Minimally and most urgently, however, we should establish a local resource hub for deportees.  

With public and private support, we can create a local body with the mandate to document ICE incursions, track persons apprehended, facilitate their access to legal remedies, support communication within their divided families and provide aid to traumatized families. Such a body might also provide a forum for public participation and policy advice in response to the assault on immigrants this new administration has promised is soon to come. 

Local government should do more than stand by, while otherwise remaining passive when our neighbors are ripped away from their families.

We are fertile soil for this initiative in Santa Cruz County, as are other communities across our state. 

Information systems already exist to track persons apprehended by ICE.  Immigration attorneys have already begun to collaborate to strengthen our local capacity for removal defense. Networks of support are already emerging for our neighbors threatened by Trump’s mass deportation agenda. My own sociological fieldwork among refugees and deportees along the U.S.-Mexico border has suggested that the greatest anxiety and most urgent need for breadwinners torn away from their families is knowing that their partners and children have some support and are OK.   

Back in 1996, Santa Clara County established the first local office of immigrant affairs in the U.S. (I served as a consultant in that process.) This enabled that county to be a leader in immigrant inclusion and defense of immigrant rights, and other counties have followed suit. In 2013, I helped our own Santa Cruz County Latino Affairs Commission successfully challenge then-Sheriff Phil Wowak’s collaboration with the “Secure Communities” program. That body demonstrated the power of a local public space for the inclusion of immigrants and responsiveness to their interests.

This is another moment for strategic leadership in immigrant affairs. And this moment calls for a proactive response to our communities’ determination to resist mass deportations.    

Paul Johnston is a sociologist who taught at Yale University from 1989 to 1997 and who has served as a UC Berkeley visiting professor and as a research sociologist at UC Santa Cruz from 1997 to 2017. He is a member of the Santa Cruz Welcoming Network and former executive director of the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council. He has lived in Santa Cruz County for 29 years.