The mood in Huntington Beach was a celebration as protests broke out in Southern California cities over Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement sweep.
The “Make America Great Again” and “Trump 2024” banners were dumped at the intersection of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway as president’s supporters were revealed in protests last month. One sign the teens had encouraged participants to “support local ice attacks.”
It wasn’t a surprise to the conservative beach town that the leader declared Huntington Beach a non-equity city a few months ago. At the time, the city filed a lawsuit against the state over a law restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, claiming that illegal immigration was to condemn the rise in crime.
“Huntington Beach doesn’t sit vaguely, and the banned sanctuary law does not allow 200,000 residents to be at risk of harm from those trying to commit violent crimes in the US soil,” Mayor Pat Burns said at the time.
Other parts of Orange County, particularly in cities with high immigration groups, the conversation about the attack has been much more calm. Republicans who voted for Trump and supported his efforts to deport those who committed crimes, expressed hesitation about a sweeping targeting workers and longtime residents.
A group of California Republican lawmakers, including two representatives of Orange County, wrote to Trump last week, urging them to direct the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office and the Department of Homeland Security, focusing enforcement activities on criminals, and “avoid the kind of attacks that will infiltrate and raid them for fear of the workplace.”
“Fear has driven important workers out of critical industries, robbed California’s affordability crisis, making it even worse for our members,” wrote lawmakers, including Congressional members Diane Dixon (R-Newport Beach) and Raleigh Davis (R-Laguna Niguel).
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They called on Trump to modernize the country’s immigration process to give undocumented immigrants with long-standing local ties a path to legal status.
John Latecop, a Republican political organizer from Orange, supports Trump’s immigration policy and says he believes the country has become safer since he began to fulfill his campaign promise to drive the country away criminals.
However, her own family history softened her views on the attack despite her attitude that deportation should continue. An undocumented immigrant from Sicily, her father was deported to Italy in the 1950s after meeting Latecop’s mother. He later returned to America to gain legal status using immigration routes, she said.
“I have a lot of compassion for people who don’t know my country and those who came when I was five,” she said. “I don’t understand why they didn’t become citizens. If they had been there, they wouldn’t have been deported.”
Trump has repeatedly said his administration is focusing on deportation efforts on criminals, but data shows that the majority of those arrested in the Los Angeles area in early June are men who have never been charged with a crime.
Early Enforcement Action – From June 1st to 10th, approximately 69% of people arrested in the Los Angeles area had no criminal convictions, and 58% were never charged with a crime.
Reitkopp said it was “sad” when the attack wiped out individuals who had not committed a crime. But she added that the federal government’s offer to allow undocumented immigrants to self-abolize and possibly get a chance to return is a silver lining.
“That’s a bad scenario, [Trump] It gives them the opportunity,” she said.
The deportation plan he outlined during his campaign is not particularly popular among many voters in Orange County.
Only a third of Orange County residents responding to the UC Irvine poll issued in January agreed with Trump on the issue. Nearly 60% of residents preferred that undocumented individuals had the option to acquire legal status.
Nearly half of white respondents supported deportation, but almost three-quarters of Latin respondents preferred legal status options, polls show.
Orange County is home to approximately 236,000 undocumented immigrants, most of whom were born in Mexico, Central America and Asia. Data at the time showed that 33% of these undocumented individuals were in the US for at least 20 years, with 67% being employed.
Jeffrey Ball, president and CEO of Orange County Business Council, said California lawmakers agreed to California lawmakers who want to focus on criminals rather than on broader sweeps.
While companies have not reported any major impacts up until now, Ball said “not the type of positive environment you want from a business perspective” when people don’t feel safe working.
“This immigrant population is an important part of our workforce,” he said. “We are still in a labor shortage in the area, and if we do so, people who are afraid of leaving or feel comfortable with it, will exacerbate some of the issues associated with the efficiency and reliability of the workforce.”
Independent Christopher Granucci acknowledged that illegal immigration has become a problem for many in Southern California, but is plagued by the indiscriminate nature of deportation.
“We’ve got millions of people in there, and I think they need to focus on lasers on 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 are not legal residents or who are on the path to gaining residence.
“If they can be more strategic about who’s been removed, that’s going to be much better,” Granucci said. “Everyone is going crazy right now. Students get crazy, and parents are surprised for it.”
In Little Saigon areas, including Westminster, Fountain Valley, Garden Groves and parts of Santa Ana, news of the attack is more intense than ever before.
There are many undocumented Vietnamese residents calling the largest ethnic enclave outside their homes. But many have not been worried about facing deportation for years, activists say, due to an agreement between the US and Vietnam that allowed most Vietnamese migrants who entered the United States before 1995 (mainly refugees who fled after the Vietnam War) to stay in the country.
An updated memorandum between the US and Vietnam in 2020 created a process for deporting such immigrants.
“All we’re seeing is those who are the immigrants themselves who support Trump’s deportation agenda, they’re just going to support it until it affects them,” said Tracy LA, executive director of Vietrise. “Trump isn’t just chasing undocumented Latino immigrants. He’s chasing Vietnamese, other Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians and many other communities. I think many people who supported it are working on it.”
In Fountain Valley, a city with a large Vietnamese population that identifies 32% of residents as foreign-born, Mayor Ted Buy has not seen much public pushback to the attack. Many Vietnamese Americans living there said they value law and order, simply view the attack as federal law enforcement, and are doing their duties.
He feels the same way, he said.
Bui’s family fled Vietnam after the collapse of Saigon, which first headed 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 elegance he felt among Americans and went through the process to become a citizen, he said.
“What are we saying if people allow us to break the law?” Bui said. “If people allow them to break the law, why do they have laws in the first place? There’s no point behind it. We’ll be a country of chaos.”
Thirty years ago, Orange County was the birthplace of Proposition 187. It is a statewide voting initiative that denied schooling, non-emergency care and other public services for immigrants who live illegally in the country.
The measure, which exceeded 59% to 41% in 1994, would have required teachers to inform authorities about children they suspected illegally were in the country. However, the law never came into effect after being blocked by a federal judge.
Anti-Ilegall immigration sentiment in Orange County was still running deep in the early 2000s. At Costa Mesa, then Alan Mansoor submitted a plan in 2005 to train city police officers to enforce immigration law.
As Orange County’s demographic continued to change, immigration became a more nuanced issue, even in Republican circles, as they moved from trusted Republican bases to politically competitive locations.
In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won Orange County, but cemented the county’s status as a suburban battlefield with a much tougher margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
At Santa Ana, a Latino immigrant hub in central Orange County, immigrant sweep sparked days of protest in downtown. City officials have been working on ways to support people and their families by demanding National Guard troops on federal court leave.
Democrat Santa Ana City Councilman Tai Vietfan said even those who agreed to protect the border with Trump are being unsettled by attacks outside Home Depot and car washes.
“People have a lot of sympathy,” fans said. “People voted for Trump mainly based on different things in the economy, but I don’t think they expected it to be like this.”
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