Immigration raids targeting workers spark dissent even in Trump-friendly Orange County
'Make America Great Again' and 'Trump 2024' banners waved at the intersection of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway as the president's supporters turned out at a protest last month. One sign held up by a teen encouraged attendees to 'support your local ICE raid.'
It wasn't a surprise in the conservative beach town where leaders had months earlier declared Huntington Beach a nonsanctuary city. At the time, the city filed a lawsuit against the state over its law limiting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, arguing that illegal immigration was to blame for a rise in crime.
'Huntington Beach will not sit idly by and allow the obstructionist sanctuary state law to put our 200,000 residents at risk of harm from those who seek to commit violent crimes on U.S. soil,' Mayor Pat Burns said at the time.
Elsewhere in Orange County, particularly in cities with higher immigrant populations, the conversation about the raids has been much more muted. Republicans who voted for Trump and support his efforts to deport those who have committed crimes expressed hesitation about the sweeps that have targeted workers and longtime residents.
A group of Republican legislators in California, including two who represent Orange County, sent a letter to Trump last week urging him to direct United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security to focus their enforcement operations on criminals and 'avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.'
'The fear is driving vital workers out of critical industries, taking California's affordability crisis and making it even worse for our constituents,' wrote the legislators, including Assemblymembers Diane Dixon (R-Newport Beach) and Laurie Davies (R-Laguna Niguel).
They called on Trump to modernize the country's immigration process to give undocumented immigrants with long-standing local ties a path toward legal status.
Jo Reitkopp, a Republican political organizer from Orange, supports Trump's immigration policy, saying that she believes the country has become safer since he began fulfilling his campaign promise to rid the country of criminals.
But her own family's history has softened her opinion about the raids, despite her stance that deportations should continue. Her father, an undocumented immigrant from Sicily, was deported to Italy in the 1950s after he'd met Reitkopp's mother. He later returned to America using a pathway for immigrants to gain legal status, she said.
'I do have a lot of compassion for the people who don't know their home country or came when they were 5,' she said. 'I don't understand why they never became citizens. If they would've, they wouldn't have been deported.'
Although Trump has repeatedly said his administration is focusing deportation efforts on criminals, data show that the majority of those arrested in early June in the Los Angeles area were men who had never been charged with a crime.
In the early days of the enforcement action — between June 1 and 10 — about 69% of those arrested in the Los Angeles region had no criminal conviction and 58% had never been charged with a crime, according to a Times data analysis.
Reitkopp said it's 'sad' when raids sweep up individuals who haven't committed crimes. But the federal government's offer for undocumented immigrants to self-deport and possibly have a chance to return is a silver lining, she added.
'It's a bad scenario, but [Trump] is giving them an opportunity,' she said.
Trump's plans for deportations that he outlined during his campaign aren't particularly popular among many Orange County voters.
Only a third of Orange County residents who responded to a UC Irvine poll published in January agreed with Trump on the issue. Nearly 60% of residents polled preferred that undocumented individuals have an option to obtain legal status.
Although almost half of white respondents supported deportations, nearly three-quarters of Latino respondents preferred an option for legal status, the poll shows.
Orange County is home to roughly 236,000 undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom were born in Mexico, Central America and Asia, according to data published in 2019 from the Migration Policy Institute. Data at the time show that 33% of those undocumented individuals had been in the United States for at least 20 years and that 67% were employed.
Jeffrey Ball, president and CEO of the Orange County Business Council, said he agrees with California lawmakers calling for immigration enforcement to be focused on criminals rather than broader sweeps.
While businesses so far haven't reported significant impacts, Ball said when people don't feel safe working 'it's not the type of positive environment you want from a business standpoint.'
'This immigrant population is an important part of our workforce,' he said. 'We are still in a labor shortage in this region and so to the extent you have people leaving the region out of fear or not feeling comfortable going to work it further exacerbates some of the problems we have related to the efficiency and reliability of the workforce.'
Christopher Granucci, an independent, acknowledged that although illegal immigration has become a problem for many in Southern California, he's troubled by the indiscriminate nature of the deportations.
'We have millions and millions of people who came in, but I think they need to be laser-focused on the real criminals,' Granucci said. 'I think for those criminals, everyone in the country agrees that they should be kicked out.'
As a teacher, Granucci has seen students whose parents aren't legal residents or are on a path to obtaining residency.
'If they could be more strategic about who is being removed, that would be so much better,' Granucci said. 'Right now, everyone is freaked out. Students are freaked out and parents are freaked out because of it.'
In areas of Little Saigon — which encompasses parts of Westminster, Fountain Valley, Garden Grove and Santa Ana — news of the raids has hit the community harder than ever before.
There are many undocumented Vietnamese residents who call the largest ethnic enclave outside of Vietnam home. But many weren't concerned about facing deportations for years, activists say, because of a 2008 agreement between the United States and Vietnam that allowed most Vietnamese immigrants who entered the United States before 1995 — mainly refugees who fled violence following the Vietnam War — to stay in the country.
An updated memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Vietnam in 2020 created a process for deporting such immigrants.
'What we're seeing is the people who are immigrants themselves that support Trump's deportation agenda only support it until it affects them,' said Tracy La, executive director of VietRISE. 'Trump isn't just going after undocumented Latino immigrants — he's going after Vietnamese, other Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indian and many other communities. That's something that I think a lot of people who supported it have been grappling with.'
In Fountain Valley, a city with a large Vietnamese American population where 32% of residents identify as being foreign-born, Mayor Ted Bui hasn't seen much public pushback for the raids. Many of the Vietnamese Americans who live there value law and order, and see the raids as federal law enforcement simply carrying out their duties, he said.
He feels the same, he said.
Bui's family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, first heading to France, where his grandfather was a citizen. He later came to the United States to study under a student visa. He fell in love with the graciousness he felt among Americans and went through the process to become a citizen, he said.
'What are we saying if we allow people to break the law?' Bui said. 'If we allow people to break the law, then why have laws in the first place? There would be no meaning behind it, and we'd be a country of chaos.'
Three decades ago, Orange County was the birthplace of Proposition 187, a statewide ballot initiative that would have denied schooling, nonemergency healthcare and other public services to immigrants living in the country illegally.
The measure, which passed 59% to 41% in 1994, would have also required teachers to tell authorities about any children they suspected of being in the country illegally. But the act never took effect after being blocked by federal judges.
Anti-illegal immigration sentiment in Orange County still ran deep into the early 2000s. In Costa Mesa, then-Mayor Allan Mansoor presented a plan in 2005 to train city police officers to enforce immigration law.
As the demographics of Orange County continued to change — transitioning from a reliable Republican stronghold to a politically competitive locale — immigration became a more nuanced issue even in Republican circles.
In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won Orange County, but by a much tighter margin than either Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020, cementing the county's position as a suburban battleground.
In Santa Ana, a Latino immigrant hub in the center of Orange County, immigration sweeps sparked days of protests downtown. City officials have demanded that National Guard troops at the federal courthouse leave and have been working on ways to help those swept up and their families.
Santa Ana City Councilmember Thai Viet Phan, a Democrat, said even those who agree with Trump about better border protection are unnerved by raids outside Home Depots and at car washes.
'People have a lot of sympathy,' Phan said. 'People voted for Trump based on a variety of things, principally the economy. But I don't think they anticipated it would be like this.'
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