Trump promises ‘mass deportations.’ Could that happen in Berkeley?

Authorities from ICE arrested a U.S. citizen in Berkeley in March 2018 in what the agency described as a criminal investigation. In addition to investigating undocumented people for being in the U.S. and violating immigration rules — civil offenses — ICE also investigates national security crimes like smuggling and human trafficking. File photo: David Gomez

It was the central message of the Republican National Convention in July. Throngs of GOP die-hards clad in crimson MAGA gear cheered their presidential candidate in Milwaukee, waving signs that ominously and simply read, “Mass deportations now!” Donald Trump — whose near-total rise to power within the party in 2016 hinged very much on birther lies about President Barack Obama’s citizenship — spoke at length to his supporters about his plans to eliminate what he has called America’s enemies within.

“Vote Republican because we’re going to begin the largest deportation operation in American history,” he told them.

This most essential GOP goal — a promise to remove millions of people from the United States — was prominently placed at the top of the GOP’s platform: “Seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion,” the party asserted.

Now back in power with a pliant Congress, Trump appears on track to fulfill his promise. He recently nominated Tom Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who recommended the so-called zero-tolerance policy during Trump’s first presidential term, as the nation’s inaugural “border czar.” And many expect Trump to make good on his plan to declare a national emergency and leverage the military to round up and remove undocumented people.

Deportations are popular with the Republican Party’s base. Still, many Americans are alarmed about the country’s anti-immigrant shift, especially in regions where immigrants comprise a significant portion of the population.

According to estimates from the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey, roughly 22% of Berkeley residents were born in another country, more than half of whom lack citizenship status. Out of Alameda County’s approximately 1.7 million residents, an estimated 107,000 do not have permanent legal status. Overall, the U.S. is home to roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants.

If carried out as Trump envisions, mass deportations would impact Berkeley and the Bay Area in ways not seen in recent history, separating huge numbers of families, disrupting businesses that rely on immigrant workforces, and inundating local courts and jails.

A campaign of mass deportations would also cost billions of dollars. A recent report from the American Immigration Council estimates that a one-time operation to deport all 11 million undocumented residents would cost $315 billion. Deporting one million immigrants per year would cost $88 billion annually. President-elect Trump has told NBC News that his mass deportation proposal has “no price tag,” signaling a willingness to tap deep into the nation’s treasury.

However, a lot has changed in Berkeley, the Bay Area, and California since Trump’s first term. While Trump and his allies have further militarized their immigration policies and ratcheted up their rhetoric — for example, lying about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets — California and the Bay Area have adopted a range of laws and policies to prevent exactly the kind of massive operation the incoming president wants. Many of these protections were passed during Trump’s first term, some earlier. Many local and state elected officials have already pledged to resist Trump’s second attempt to depopulate communities of undocumented people.

So, how might this play out locally? Could Trump’s plan result in large numbers of Berkeley residents facing deportation? Or are city, county and state policies a bulwark against this?

Is Trump’s mass deportation plan even possible?

Most immigration experts agree that Trump could make the lives of undocumented people a lot more stressful and difficult, but there is less agreement over whether it’s possible to deport millions of people in just a few years, as the Republicans have promised.

While deportation sounds like a straightforward process, actually conducting one often requires coordination across different levels of government and a complex civil legal process. Any plan to deport scores of immigrants will need to rely on local and state law enforcement agencies to identify, arrest, hold, and transfer undocumented people to federal immigration agents.

There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country; Alameda County alone has over a dozen police departments. The Trump administration would have to rely on this intricate web of local agencies to get the job done. And that cooperation isn’t guaranteed in places like California.

Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center, said she thinks Trump’s plans to deport millions of immigrants are not feasible.

While the president-elect’s ambitions may gain traction in conservative states like Texas or Florida, Cheer said state, county and city law enforcement agencies have their own set of rules when it comes to cooperation and communication with federal immigration authorities.

“I would hope that in California, they’d be met with a resounding ‘No’ if they try to ask local law enforcement agencies to become ICE agents,” she said. However, there are “still many pockets of California that are pretty red and where sheriffs actively collude with ICE, so that’s an area of concern.”

People who are taken into custody and entitled to a hearing before a judge must go through multiple deportation proceedings to determine if they are eligible to stay. But not everyone gets a hearing; in some cases, people are deported without one.

If a person is not detained, their case can go on for years, whereas cases in which the person is detained tend to move quicker, according to Raha Jorjani, managing attorney of the Immigration Representation Unit at the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office. But many cases can go on for years as well, even when a person is detained.

People are also not guaranteed an immigration attorney in the same way they’re guaranteed an attorney if they face criminal charges.

“That’s why the program here at the Public Defender’s Office is so important,” Jorjani said, referring to her team of public defenders who consider the immigration implications of clients’ criminal cases. “We already know that our clients cannot afford attorneys, and therefore wouldn’t be able to afford immigration attorneys. Our immigration unit allows us to follow them from the criminal legal system to the immigration system and represent them there.”

Established in 2014, the Alameda County Public Defender’s Immigration Unit was one of the first of its kind. Similar programs operate in San Francisco, Contra Costa, and other counties. Some of these programs were launched during Trump’s first term.

California has 11 immigration courts; the Bay Area’s immigration courts are in San Francisco and Concord. There are no immigration courts in Alameda County, so undocumented Alameda County residents who are facing deportation are transferred to one of the state’s immigration courts. Some of Jorjani’s office’s clients are detained in Southern California, so she or her staff have to travel hundreds of miles to represent them in court if the case requires it.

While she could not give a precise number of people in Alameda County who have been deported in recent years, Jorjani said the public defender’s office “regularly represents” clients facing deportation.

Additionally, a person doesn’t have to be undocumented to be deported. The U.S. regularly deports lawful permanent residents (green card holders), as well as asylees and refugees. This also includes people who are crime victims and veterans, Jorjani said.

3 California laws prevent local law enforcement agencies from working with ICE

The California legislature over the years has pushed back on tough-on-immigration policies by enacting protections for undocumented immigrants. Credit: Natalie Orenstein

Over the past decade, the California legislature has enacted three laws to safeguard protections for undocumented people. Also known as “sanctuary laws,” they generally limit cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities and restrict when a person can be detained based on their immigration status.

The first is the California TRUST Act, or Assembly Bill 4. Enacted in 2014, it limits local jails from detaining undocumented people for an extended time solely to await deportation. The law only allows for immigration holds for people who have been convicted of serious or violent crimes, such as murder or rape.

California lawmakers passed the TRUST Act in response to ICE’s Secure Communities program, an outgrowth of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Launched in 2008 by President George W. Bush, Secure Communities ensured that when undocumented people were arrested by local police, ICE would be alerted so they could detain and deport the person.

As part of the program, ICE can issue “detainers,” or requests that a local jail keep an undocumented person in their custody for ICE agents to later arrest and deport them. Barack Obama expanded Secure Communities to all U.S. jails, resulting in higher numbers of deportations of undocumented people arrested on criminal charges. (Some people even dubbed Obama the “deporter-in-chief” — he deported more people in either one of his two terms than Trump did in his first one — although Obama later ended Secure Communities, citing the distrust it was creating between immigrant communities and police, and replaced it with a less aggressive program.)

Already pushing back against federal immigration policies of previous Republican and Democratic administrations, California lawmakers under the first Trump administration imposed more limits on the ability of federal immigration authorities to utilize local law enforcement.

In 2017, California passed the TRUTH Act. It increased transparency by requiring local law enforcement to inform people in custody of their rights before allowing federal ICE agents to interview them, including their right to decline, as well as letting them know the purpose of the interview and that it’s voluntary.

The TRUTH Act also requires local law enforcement agencies to release information about their communications and cooperation with ICE in an annual public forum. During these meetings, local police, sheriffs and other law enforcement must share the number and demographics of people to whom they’ve given ICE access for interviews or other purposes, when that access was granted, and whether that access was made possible through a hold, transfer or other request.

The last TRUTH Act forum the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office held was in 2022. It revealed that in 2021, ICE issued detainers for 81 people held at Santa Rita Jail. Of those, 59 were Hispanic men, 12 were Asian men, three were Black men, one was a white man, three men were marked as “other” race or ethnicity, and three were Hispanic women.

The sheriff’s office responded to one detainer for a Hispanic man, meaning the man was later transferred to an ICE detention facility.

The California TRUTH Act requires local law enforcement agencies to disclose the number of immigration enforcement-related arrests made every year. Credit: Pete Rosos

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office remains compliant with the TRUTH Act, according to public information officer Sergeant Roberto Morales. He said the sheriff’s office did not receive or respond to any detainers from ICE in 2023, so it will not hold a TRUTH Act forum this year.

In 2022, incoming Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez told community members that she disagreed with former Sheriff Gregory Ahern’s stance on communicating with ICE. For years, Ahern held that it was legal and appropriate for his deputies to work with ICE when the agency wanted to contact someone in Santa Rita Jail and detain them. Ahern’s policies only changed when state law required less contact and no more immigration holds.

Sanchez assured the public the only way the sheriff’s office would interact with ICE was if ICE presented a criminal warrant signed by a judge for someone to take into custody.

“I believe that restricting this communication with ICE will allow for our undocumented community members to feel safe living in our county,” she said.

California’s strongest law limiting immigration agents from using local law enforcement to identify and detain undocumented people was passed in 2017. The California Values Act, or SB 54, prohibits law enforcement agencies from using state and local resources to assist with any immigration enforcement matter. It also bars local jails from disclosing a person’s release date to ICE and establishes restrictions on whether local law enforcement can directly transfer people to immigration detention facilities.

The Values Act also orders the state attorney general to write “model policies” limiting assistance with immigration authorities for public schools, libraries, courthouses and other facilities. All public schools, state-operated healthcare facilities and courthouses must adopt the model policy or something similar. Certain facilities — including homeless shelters, libraries, mental health service providers, the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board and the University of California — are encouraged, but not required, to implement the policy.

Additionally, since 2018, the Values Act has required local law enforcement agencies that partner with federal law enforcement — called “joint law enforcement task forces” — to report the number of immigration-related arrests they make each year to the California Department of Justice. These statistics are then published in an annual report every March via the state DOJ’s Open Justice data portal.

In 2018, when the California DOJ began tracking immigration enforcement-related arrests, joint law enforcement task forces arrested eight people statewide. There was a peak in 2019 with 35 reported arrests. Since then, task forces have reported arresting either one or zero people each year for immigration enforcement.

The next SB 54 annual report, which will include arrests made in 2024, will be published in March 2025.

California doesn’t work with ICE, but immigration advocates still worry about loopholes

There are ways federal immigration authorities have circumvented city and state sanctuary protections, according to Carl Takei, program director of community safety for the Asian Law Caucus.

“One of the ways ICE gains information about our community members is through information-sharing arrangements with other federal agencies,” he said. “These mechanisms could be repurposed by the new Trump administration … as part of Trump’s mass deportation plans.”

One loophole, advocates say, has been fusion centers, facilities where local and state agencies can share information and data with federal agencies for criminal investigations. There are 80 fusion centers across the country, with six in California.

The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, located in San Francisco, is one of those facilities. It hosts dozens of law enforcement, health care, private and public safety agencies from 15 counties throughout Northern California.

Based on records Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission Chair Brian Hofer requested from NCRIC seven years ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had access to information from the Oakland Police Department, Oakland Housing Authority, and over 40 other agencies in Alameda County.

In 2017, Hofer wrote in a letter to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee that by OPD sharing information with NCRIC, it “may be inadvertently placing data of Oaklander’s [sic] at risk, as entities like ICE also participate in those sharing agreements, and in fact, do query those databases.”

“We’re exposing these people and sending their data to [agencies] that are now going to be in charge of mass deportations,” Hofer said in an interview. “There will never be any local government that’s going to resist a federal order.”

NCRIC Executive Director Mike Sena said that ICE and other federal agencies cannot request data from NCRIC solely for civil immigration enforcement purposes. However, NCRIC could supply information to ICE for criminal investigations, which may reveal a person’s immigration status. In addition to investigating undocumented people for being in the U.S. and violating immigration rules — civil offenses — ICE also investigates national security crimes like smuggling and human trafficking.

“We want people to feel that they can trust their local law enforcement and come to them if there’s a violation of the law,” Sena said. “People who don’t have documentation to be in the country … shouldn’t be afraid that by contacting law enforcement, they’re in jeopardy.”

Many advocates don’t fully trust these kinds of assurances. Hofer, who also serves as the executive director of the nonprofit organization Secure Justice, said community members without legal status are not immune to deportation and should not depend on local authorities to protect them from ICE.

“My message to immigrants is, do not bet your life on local and state government officials to save you,” Hofer said. “It’s really up to the people to defend themselves.”

Berkeley has been a ‘sanctuary city’ for undocumented immigrants decades

Trump’s control of the Republican Party is not the sole reason California and cities like Berkeley have sought at times to protect immigrant community members. Just as pushback against Secure Communities began during the Bush and Obama years, city leaders have worked to bolster protections for undocumented people at other times when immigrant communities were at risk.

Berkeley has been a “city of refuge” for more than half a century. In 1971 the city offered refuge to U.S. sailors who opposed the Vietnam War and wished not to deploy to Vietnam. That policy document evolved over the decades to involve those seeking sanctuary from immigration agents. In 2017, around the time of Trump’s first inauguration, then-Mayor Jesse Arreguín convened a task force to update Berkeley’s sanctuary city policies and protocols.

Immigration enforcement has provoked high-profile protests in Berkeley.

In 2010 a small group of UC Berkeley students staged a hunger strike to protest a controversial state law in Arizona that made it illegal for immigrants to live in or travel through that state unless they are carrying state-issued IDs. While that group started out as just 19 people, hundreds of other protesters eventually gathered to support those who were fasting.

In 2013 hundreds more organized to try to bring a 9-year-old Jefferson Elementary School student back to Berkeley after he and his family were denied re-entry into the U.S. from Mexico over expired visas.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned a Berkeley Ecology Center worker in 2018 for a decades-old conviction, reducing — though not eliminating — the threat of deportation to China. The same year ICE detained an undocumented third-year UC Berkeley student for three weeks before allowing him to return to classes.

What might the incoming Trump administration do and how might Berkeley and California respond?

Brian Hofer, executive director of the nonprofit Secure Justice, says Secure Justice will hold privacy self-defense trainings across the Bay Area in early 2025. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez

While we have a rough sense of what Trump’s plans are for his second presidential term, there are still many unknowns.

Hofer, Oakland’s privacy commissioner, thinks undocumented people should prepare for the worst. In early 2025, Hofer’s nonprofit, Secure Justice, is planning to host several privacy self-defense trainings across the Bay Area. Those workshops will be free and open to everyone.

“They’re not going to be limited solely or exclusively to immigration, but that’s going to be a big focus — teaching people how to use encrypted texting, privacy settings on the apps they use, and turning off location tracking,” Hofer said.

In Berkeley, city agencies are forbidden by policy from using public funds or resources to assist federal immigration enforcement work or gather or retain data on immigration statuses, except where required by law. If ICE agencies approach city workers, they are instructed to refer the agents to department directors and the City Attorney’s Office.

Berkeley police officers are instructed not to ask about immigration status or make any arrests strictly for immigration enforcement purposes. A department policy also prohibits BPD personnel from letting ICE agents into the city jail to conduct interviews about civil immigration violations. (In 2018 ICE arrested a U.S. citizen in Berkeley in what the agency described as a criminal investigation and matter of public safety. BPD did not assist in that investigation.)

The Berkeley Unified School District adopted a series of protections for undocumented students following the 2016 presidential election and revised them in 2018. The district administration has directed staff never to request information on or make records of students’ or their family members’ immigration statuses. If ICE agents approach district personnel, either to enter a school building or to seek information, district policy is to refer the agents to the superintendent’s office and the district’s attorneys.

“As inauguration day approaches, we understand that some of our students may experience a range of feelings and concerns,” Superintendent Enikia Ford Mothel wrote to BUSD families in Nov. 20 letter that included links to resources for immigrant families and other groups who may fear shrinking protections.

Sergeant Roberto Morales, public information officer for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, also wrote in an email to that the office “maintains a zero-contact policy with immigration officials, focusing on public safety and building trust within our diverse communities. While we honor criminal warrants signed by a judge, we do not comply with administrative warrants.”

In other words, Santa Rita Jail will not hand over undocumented people to ICE, unless ICE is arresting them for something other than an immigration violation.

Courtney McCausland, co-director for immigration at the East Bay Community Law Center, said the “impulse” of the state government is “moving away slightly from direct legal services and towards federal litigation.” By contrast, she said, there was more momentum following the 2016 election to fund organizations that provide legal and other services to newcomers to the U.S. and their families.

Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom called the California Legislature into a special session, workshopping a new statewide litigation fund aimed at countering the federal policy shift President-elect Donald Trump ran on, including around immigration. Newsom “is seeking up to $25 million for the California Department of Justice … and state agencies to defend against unconstitutional or unlawful federal government actions, challenge federal overreach in court and take administrative actions to reduce potential harm,” according to a summary of the proposal.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, himself a Filipino immigrant, posted on X that he would “use the full force of the law and the full authority of my office” to protect undocumented Californians.

The Alameda County Public Defender’s Office plans to continue providing critical legal services to undocumented people who are charged with crimes, helping them navigate any exposure they might have to the civil immigration courts. But Jorjani, the public defender who runs that program, is also taking a look at the bigger picture.

“We won’t be able to stop all the harm,” she said, “but I think this is the time to look inward and ask ourselves, ‘What are our talents? What are our strengths? How can we be useful and work together to protect basic civil and human rights?’”

McCausland encouraged anyone with concerns about their immigration status to consult an immigration attorney, to watch out for fraudsters who prey on newcomers and “to arm yourself with knowledge and not give in to the fear,” to “not give in to the anxiety and instability that this next administration is actively trying to sow.”