Supporters of the sanctuary movement around the U.S. believe they have morality on their side. The deportation regime unleashed by President Donald Trump is largely indiscriminate.
In its short, arbitrary span, it has targeted a longtime resident and mother of American children in Phoenix. It has imprisoned (and perhaps slandered) a young man in Washington state who was protected under the executive action for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, which was signed by President Barack Obama and has yet to be rescinded by Trump.
It has ensnared two prominent neurologists in Houston, who were initially given 24 hours to pack with their children and return to India, where they haven’t lived in 15 years. (They were subsequently given a “parole” of three months to enable them to deal with dozens of patients.)
The sanctuary movement (Providence Mayor Jorge O. Elorza has identified the city as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants) insists on asking questions for which Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no particularly good answers. The movement’s moral claims are its strongest markers. But they may rest on shaky political ground. Public polling on sanctuary cities is highly variable, dependent on specific poll language and inferences about the criminality of immigrants.
National polls show consistently low support for mass deportation.
But in one key respect, the Trump administration has time on its side. The undocumented population is estimated to be about 11 million. Any population that large is bound to have a criminal element. And the Trump administration and its allies are poised to exploit that.
The FBI says there were an estimated 90,185 rapes in the U.S. in 2015, or 247 per day. Very few of those crimes draw national media attention. Yet when an undocumented teenager was accused of raping a high school freshman in Maryland, it created a basis for news that political operatives can use.
On March 20, the Department of Homeland Security began publishing a weekly report identifying noncitizens who had been charged with crimes but released by local jurisdictions. It’s a campaign with two clear goals: to associate immigrants with criminality, as Trump did relentlessly throughout his campaign, and to blame sanctuary policies for aiding and abetting crime.
Americans are sympathetic to undocumented immigrants, but not to undocumented “criminals.”
Even in California, the nation’s beacon of immigration and multiculturalism, ambivalence about sanctuary cities is evident.
A recent University of California at Berkeley poll asked whether California cities and counties should “be able to ignore requests from federal authorities to detain undocumented immigrants who have been arrested and are about to be released.” A slim majority of California registered voters, 53-47, said localities shouldn’t be able to ignore federal requests.
Trump won’t necessarily win this battle, but in addition to having thousands of lawyers and immigration agents under his authority, Trump has a vast capacity to shape perception. He is an able and unashamed propagandist who will make the most of his opportunities.
In the absence of an event capable of galvanizing public opinion behind immigrants, this is a war of attrition, one deportation at a time. That’s a war Trump can win.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials for Bloomberg View.
