Trump's Immigration Raids and State Pushback

0:00Richard Thompson Ford:Any aspect of domestic policy can be tied to an immigration enforcement objective. And so when we continue to try to say immigration is exceptional and deserves a special set of rules, we can expect that this administration can use that exceptionalism to undercut all manner of a state or locality's preference around policing, around education, around health care, because all of those things are inexplicably joined with immigration in a nation where 15 % of the population is immigrant.

0:39Jennifer Chacón:This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I'm Rich Ford. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way you'll have access to all of our new episodes as soon as they're available today. Political commentators have attributed immigration and the surge of immigration at the southern border during Joe Biden's term as a key factor in President Trump's successful campaign for a second shot at the White House. And since taking office, border crossings are at their lowest point in 50 years. But Trump also promised to deport undocumented immigrants already in the country who he claimed were responsible for violent crime, unemployment among citizens, even missing pets.

1:27Jennifer Chacón:Many worried that deportations would involve a much more serious disruption to established communities than border control did. And so in today's discussion, we're looking at Trump's efforts inside the U.S., where the deployment of federal border and ICE agents have led to an unprecedented surge in armed and mask personnel on the streets of cities, largely Democratic cities, Los Angeles, Portland, and of course, most recently, Minneapolis, with the tragic consequence of the death of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Preddy, in January. Here to help explain some of the key legal issues related to immigration under the Trump administration is Jennifer Chacon, my colleague at Stanford Law School, where she teaches and researches about the issues that arise at the nexus of immigration law, constitutional law, criminal law, and procedure, highlighting how legal frameworks on immigration and law enforcement shape individual and collective understandings of racial and ethnic identity, citizenship, civic engagement, and social belonging.

2:32Jennifer Chacón:She's the co-author of an immigration law casebook, Immigration Law and Social Justice, now in its second edition, and the co-author of Legal Phantoms by Stanford University Press, which explores how the past decade's shifting immigration policies have shaped and been shaped by immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

2:56Richard Thompson Ford:Thank you so much.

2:57Jennifer Chacón:So can we start by talking about the current immigration situation in the U.S. a bit more than a year into the second Trump administration? The country seems to be in shock after the deployment of federal border agents to various cities, mask agents that have come in in unmarked vehicles, carrying heavy assault weapons, and particularly, of course, after the tragic shootings and deaths in Minneapolis. Maybe worth noting that in Minneapolis, up to 3 ,000 border agents were on the streets in a city with only 600 regular police officers, relatively low crime rates and low levels of undocumented immigration.

3:41Jennifer Chacón:What's your assessment of the situation of this immigration or anti-immigration push on the ground right now?

3:47Richard Thompson Ford:Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing is in some ways and an effort on the part of the Trump administration to fulfill a campaign promise. But I'm also I also think we're seeing a mismatch between what people thought they were voting for and what the administration wants to do. And so I think, you know, we can all remember the president's rhetoric in in campaigning. And that really focused on the deportation of groups of people, people that he called, quote unquote, criminal aliens. So presumably those individuals who committed violence in their communities and should be deported. But what we're seeing, of course, is a set of enforcement practices that are targeted much more broadly.

4:31Richard Thompson Ford:This isn't really surprising to anybody who had ever focused on immigration policy before the election. But I think it is surprising to many of the people who were caught up in the campaign rhetoric. So I think many people assume that large numbers of unauthorized migrants are in the country committing heinous acts of crime. Some of those acts of crime are elevated by the media because they're sensational and sensationalistic. But I think the reality is that the vast majority of unauthorized migrants that are in the country have no criminal record and no contact with a criminal legal system, that in fact, all of the data show that they are less likely to have contact with a criminal legal system than citizens who are similarly situated.

5:10Richard Thompson Ford:So it's unsurprising that there just aren't vast numbers of quote unquote criminal aliens that are low hanging fruit for the administration to remove. And so instead, what this has become is a campaign that really is targeting pretty much anyone who's present in the country without authorization, as well as a significant number of people who have or have had legal status. And we can see the administration removing legal status for various groups and then targeting those groups for deportation as well. Yes.

5:44Jennifer Chacón:One of the things the last time we spoke about this that really struck me was you mentioned, just now you mentioned that this isn't surprising to anyone who's actually studied the issue, but it might be surprising to other people. But the last time we spoke, you mentioned that there was really no way of implementing the Trump administration's agenda without it affecting large numbers of Americans, both citizens and non-citizens. So something like what we're seeing now in places like Minneapolis. Could you say a little bit more about why that is? Sure.

6:17Richard Thompson Ford:So I think one of the things that you said in introducing this segment was really important to highlight. So you noted that the numbers of border apprehensions and indeed border encounters are really way down from where they had been under President Biden and actually way down from where they've been any time over the last 20 or more years. So border encounters at the southern border are at historically low levels. There are multiple reasons, both that they surged under President Biden and that they're lower now. So President Biden's administration was dealing with a backlog of people coming to the southern border who had been prevented from seeking asylum or entering under the COVID protocols.

6:55So there were all of those people.

6:57Richard Thompson Ford:There was massive political upheaval and turmoil in Venezuela that pushed large numbers of people from Venezuela to the southern border. And so the sort of the combined promise of actually having asylum pathways open again with larger numbers of people who were seeing political violence and other forms of chaos in their home countries really spurred this large group of people to come to the border. And the Biden administration spent much of its time trying to move those people into legal pathways, get people into channels to handle their asylum claim. And much of that really stoked some public pushback.

7:30Richard Thompson Ford:Too many people were seen as coming in. Too many people were seen as being given pathways. And in some cases, people who are recent arrivals were being given forms of protected status like TPS or humanitarian parole that long term undocumented residents hadn't had access to. So there also felt there was also some felt unfairness and chaos to the way that this unfolded. That said, there were lots of external forces that were really producing this dynamic. When Trump came into office, he made it very clear that there was going to be no asylum processing, that people who had humanitarian parole and temporary protected status were going to lose it.

8:04Richard Thompson Ford:And so this doesn't mean that the external factors have been solved, but it does mean that if you are fearing political persecution in your home country or facing violence or other displacement due to any sorts of widespread disasters, your first thought is not going to be to come to the United States at this time, right? Because there's a sense that those pathways are closed. So that reduces the number of border apprehensions, the sort of external policy. And of course, the Biden administration had really handled and you could see the number of border apprehensions really falling at the last part of the Biden administration that really handled the backlog.

8:40Richard Thompson Ford:So although it looks chaotic on the ground, there were a lot of systems in place that were really making that line trend down. So it was already trending down. And then Trump came in and basically declared the border closed. Well, so if there's nobody to apprehend or very small numbers of people to apprehend at the southern border, and you have a very, very large immigration enforcement budget with Congress handing you billions of extra dollars, as they did in the middle of this fiscal year, that enforcement energy is going to be focused on interior policing. And that is what we're seeing. So ICE agents, Customs and Border Protection agents were operating in places like Minneapolis and Portland, right, shifting their energies from the southern border and southern border apprehension to cities all across America and not just cities.

9:25Richard Thompson Ford:There was a story in The New York Times today about a massive immigration raid in rural Idaho. So it is happening all over the country with more pushback, I think, in places where the politics of place lead to higher disjunctures between what the Trump administration wants and what local communities want. And that pushback is part of what we're seeing in places like Minneapolis. So those are the facts on the ground that we're facing. Huge immigration enforcement budgets, huge ramping up of hiring in ICE and CBP, and nowhere for those energies to go except to police within the United States.

9:58Jennifer Chacón:I see. And I want to come back to the question of the pushback in a moment. But first, one thing that you touched on was that Trump closed the border. And so, you know, essentially closing the border, meaning we don't take any asylum cases, despite the fact that the United States continues to have obligations under international law to consider legitimate asylum cases. I want to talk a little bit about that, but also about other ways in which the Trump administration's approach to dealing with immigration. You know, whatever you think about the goal is in tension with the law. So, for instance, another example of that involves the use of race and racial profiling in the immigration crackdown.

10:39Jennifer Chacón:Can you say a little bit about how that's happening and what's going on in the courts with respect to that? Sure.

10:45Richard Thompson Ford:So in some ways, the Trump administration is not an author of racial profiling in immigration enforcement. We have a long history of the use of race in immigration enforcement in this country. But it does represent a sort of retropression on the issue of the use of race in immigration enforcement. And here's what I mean by that. The court in 1975, in a case called Brignoni-Ponce, said that trained border patrol agents could rely on race as one factor when they were making a determination as to whether an individual, whether there was reasonable suspicion that an individual was present in violation of the law or committing an immigration crime.

11:20Richard Thompson Ford:Those are two different things, but I'll, for purposes of this discussion, sort of conflate them, right? So reasonable suspicion of that immigration violation. In the case of Brigno-Nippon-Sea, it was a crime. It was the crime of human smuggling that he was arrested for. And so the idea that you could use race as a factor is embedded then in U.S. law in 1975. And that's a notable date, right, because you're realizing this is 10 years after the kind of civil rights revolution, the passage of major legislation that's really striving to eliminate the sort of invidious use of race in U.S. legal systems.

11:57Richard Thompson Ford:And yet, at the same time, the court is saying it's fine to treat people who have, quote unquote, Mexican appearance differently in policing. And this was uncomfortable at the time. There's a strong dissent pointing out the problems with this approach. But it became increasingly uncomfortable as time went on for two reasons. One reason is that the demographics of the country have shifted substantially. So lots and lots of people appear Mexican, particularly when we think of Mexican appearance as something that's not either limited to nor exclusive among Mexicans, right? It encompasses many, many Latina people who would be characterized as appearing Mexican.

12:33Richard Thompson Ford:Mexican. So that's like a good chunk of Southern California, a good chunk of South Texas, a good chunk of Arizona, right? Many, many people. And so the idea that this is going to be a useful thing to take into account in policing immigration becomes much more problematic. The demographics of who's undocumented has shifted. So many, many more people from Asia as they overstay their visas become undocumented. 40 % of the undocumented population's visa overstays. It's a much more diverse population. So this category, this kind of idea that undocumented people will have Mexican appearance is both wildly over-inclusive and also under-inclusive.

13:10Richard Thompson Ford:It just doesn't make sense. So demographically, that doesn't work anymore. At the same time, the equal protection jurisprudence from the court has really shifted when it comes to how we think about the use of race. So in 1975, you could use race in affirmative action, for example. In 2025, you can't use race for that or any benign purpose or impidious purpose. And there it becomes much more uncomfortable to say, and yet we're going to rely on race explicitly when policing something that has serious negative consequences. So this shift was something that the Ninth Circuit picked up on really 25 years ago.

13:48Richard Thompson Ford:They said it doesn't make sense in Southern California to rely on something like Mexican appearances and racial notion when policing immigration. And so in the Ninth Circuit for really over two decades, it has been impermissible to use race in policing immigration. And so this was true in federal courts. And it was an argument the government couldn't use, though they could use it in other parts of the country when they were policing in Southern California. So when we get to 2025, we saw the ACLU successfully litigate some of the stops that were happening in Southern California. We saw that the Trump administration, the Customs and Border Protection agents and ICE agents in Southern California were relying heavily on race as one of the factors that they were taking into account when they were deciding who to stop for potential immigration biologists, going to places like Home Depot parking lots or car washes and just assuming that because it was a place of low income work, where someone appeared Mexican or perhaps spoke Spanish, that this was sufficient evidence of an immigration violation.

14:48Richard Thompson Ford:And of course, what we know from the ACLU litigation there, that meant that a lot of citizens and legally present immigrants were caught up in these raids, were subject to questions, sometimes were detained, sometimes were detained for very lengthy periods of time that far exceed a lawful stop. And so we can see that the reliance on race is problematic, leads unsurprisingly to lots of people who are not the proper subject of immigration enforcement being caught up in this dynamic and really doesn't fit with the idea that there's reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation. You can't tell by looking at someone in Southern California walking down the street or working in their job that they're undocumented.

15:29Richard Thompson Ford:And so I think we need new approaches to policing immigration. And this idea that you can street police on appearance doesn't make sense. And yet, although a district court stayed the practice and the Ninth Circuit issued a temporary restraining order of that practice, and the Ninth Circuit upheld that temporary restraining order, we saw the Supreme Court step in essentially to stop that temporary restraining order from being in effect so that temporary restraining order is no longer in effect while the litigation continues. So at this time, with the Supreme Court's assist on the shadow docket without an accompanying order with reasoning, we have racial profiling happening, not just in Southern California, but also in Minneapolis, where the data is showing that Somali communities and Latina communities are being stopped.

16:15Richard Thompson Ford:overwhelmingly citizens and lawfully present immigrants are being caught up in these stops. So some people are being policed differently because of what they look like. It seems antithetical to the values that we have in this country around what should happen, although, as you know, perhaps consonant with our long histories of policing. But it does seem like the Supreme Court's intervention here has really greenlighted a set of practices that are at odds with the sorts of legal frameworks that seem to govern the rest of American life in 2026.

16:48Jennifer Chacón:We'll see what happens when the Supreme Court finally gives us a judgment on the merits with respect to that. But it is striking when you mention affirmative action that one of the examples that Chief Justice John Roberts used in the Students for Fair Admissions case involved the fact that universities didn't make appropriate distinctions between people of Latino ancestry, They didn't bother to distinguish between Mexican-Americans and people from South America in implementing an affirmative action policy. And this is precisely what's happening in enforcement actions where we're going to stop people who look Mexican or look like they might be undocumented.

17:28Jennifer Chacón:You know, a theme that's now coming forward that I'd like to expand on is the way these aggressive immigration enforcements might be in some sense degrading other areas of civic life. So, for instance, our policing, which, as you say, has never been perfect and has often had a component of racial injustice as part of it, but in many respects was getting better. Now, perhaps, it's getting worse, at least in the context of the immigration enforcement. How's that relating to local law enforcement? Another issue that's come up is the striking number of court orders that the administration has just ignored with respect to immigration enforcement.

18:15Jennifer Chacón:So Chief Judge Patrick Schlitz, who was an appointee of George W. Bush, noted with a great deal of dismay that it appears that at least in 74 different cases, people – the administration ignored court orders for people that were wrongly detained. So do you have any comment about that and the phenomenon of whether the judiciary is able to deal with unlawful uses of authority here?

18:48Richard Thompson Ford:Yeah, two great questions. So one on sort of the overall impact on policing and then one on sort of what the judiciary can do and whether there's sort of unprecedented or at least unusual patterns of behavior from the administration when it comes to court orders. So on the first point on local law enforcement, I think you're absolutely right that this changes the character of local policing. And it happens in a lot of different ways. But one way that I can highlight is that lawyers generally know that in criminal proceedings, if the government acts unlawfully in searching or seizing evidence, then in many cases, that evidence is subject to suppression in the criminal trial.

19:29Richard Thompson Ford:The idea here is that you disincentivize law enforcement from engaging in illegal activity. And then one way to disincentivize them is to say you're not going to be able to use this in criminal prosecution. The Supreme Court's limited that in a number of ways in the criminal context. But it's important to note that it has never operated in the immigration context. So in 1984, in a case called Lopez Mendoza, the court said, well, the immigration proceedings are unrelated to the criminal proceedings and to criminal policing. And we have no evidence that the INS is engaged in widespread violations of people's rights.

20:02Richard Thompson Ford:So there's really no need for a suppression remedy in immigration courts. So one of the kind of practical consequences of this is even if local law enforcement behaves in a way that, say, unlawfully racially profiles or results in an illegal seizure or results in an illegal search of some kind, that evidence, which might not be admissible in a criminal court for a local or for a state criminal proceeding, is admissible in immigration courts and can be used against immigrants in a variety of ways. And in many cases, you don't even need that evidence in immigration courts because if people are undocumented, then that's sort of an easy route anyway.

20:39Richard Thompson Ford:So this has a sort of the effect on local law enforcement that they're not worried as much about some of the constraining effects of the criminal legal process, because that is not the system that they're going to be worried about interfacing with. They're going to be interfacing with a much more permissive civil processes. So you have states and localities that have really tried to shore up that barrier by decreasing state and local law enforcement cooperation with the federal government, places like California. But you also have jurisdictions that have really tried to streamline and reinforce that cooperation, places like Texas and Florida.

21:10Richard Thompson Ford:And in those places, I think some of the kinds of violations that you see immigration enforcement agents engaging in trickle down to other spaces because there's less concern about the constraining effects of criminal procedural protections. on court orders. A lot of this has come up in the context of detention, immigration detention. And immigration detention, it's important to note, is civil detention. This has nothing to do with criminal law. It has nothing to do with criminal procedures, and it doesn't come out as a result of a crime. It's just that you are in immigration proceedings, and under the statute, you may be subject to detention during those immigration proceedings.

21:46Richard Thompson Ford:It's a civil detention. Congress has mandated that some categories of immigrants are subject to mandatory detention, meaning that Even if they are personally not a flight risk, even if they are personally no danger to their community, they are still subject under these categorical laws to mandatory detention throughout the pendency of their immigration proceedings. For many, many years, in fact, since these mandatory detention provisions were really shaped in 1996, that was not read to encompass individuals who had entered without inspection, but who had been present in the country for a long period of time.

22:25Richard Thompson Ford:The Trump administration has reinterpreted the mandatory detention provisions and has decided that if you entered without inspection, you are seeking an admission and therefore subject to the same mandatory detention provisions that would govern somebody who newly arrives at the border. So millions of people who have lived here for decades are suddenly subject to the possibility of mandatory detention with no possibility of bail and no adjudication of whether they pose a danger or flight risk for as long as it takes for the administration to adjudicate their claim. No possibility of release. This interpretation of the statute is something that many federal judges have rejected in habeas proceedings.

23:03Richard Thompson Ford:They find that that's not what the statute says. They find it's inconsistent with some more recently passed laws and certainly inconsistent with the government's practice for the past 30 years. So they're saying, release these people. You're holding them unlawfully. That is the habeas action. The Trump administration, either because they're insufficiently staffed or because they're insufficiently concerned about these orders, has been pretty slow to release some of these people. And that's the order that you referenced. And this is not unique to situations in his courthouse. But the idea is they're just not getting these people out of detention.