California group ready to fight any deportations

Asian Pacific Islander civil rights groups in San Francisco Bay Area present their response and strategies to Donald Trump's presidential inauguration at a press conference in San Francisco on Monday. LIA ZHU / CHINA DAILY

With approximately 2.4 million of the state's 10 million immigrants being undocumented according to the Department of Homeland Security, the state stands to be one of the hardest hit by Trump's announced plan to deport undocumented immigrants, said Angela Chan, policy director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, at a press conference on Monday in San Francisco.

In San Francisco, there are an estimated 14,000 Asia Pacific Islander undocumented immigrants, and 10,000 of them are Chinese, according to the group.

Chan said her group is advocating for passage of a pending state bill known as the California Values Act (SB 54), written by state Senator Kevin de León, to protect due process rights of immigrants.

The California Values Act would ban state and local law enforcement officials from performing the functions of a federal immigration officer, while it does not prevent state and local departments or agencies from complying with a judicial warrant to transfer violent offenders into federal custody for immigration enforcement purposes.

The bill would prohibit state and local law enforcement, including school police and security departments, from using their resources for immigration enforcement. It also would also create "safe zones" at public schools, hospitals and courthouses where immigrant enforcement would be banned, and require state agencies to update their confidentiality policies so that information on individuals' immigration status is not shared for enforcement purposes.

Chan said the bill is expected to be passed at the end of this spring.

Trump has indicated he will immediately clamp down on illegal immigration by launching workplace raids and curtailing new entrants and refugees in the first days of his new administration. His administration said on Monday that he will focus immigration enforcement efforts first on criminal immigrants in the country illegally.

A survey by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University of the more than 1,400 California residents surveyed online between Jan 5 and Jan 9, showed that 41 percent of respondents oppose the "sanctuary" policy that some California cities have initiated, and 40 percent support it. When informed that Trump opposes sanctuary cities, the percentage of respondents who oppose the policy fell from 41 to 37 percent.

"Trump wants to roll back the sanctuary cities, we are saying 'no', even though he threatened to cut off funding to San Francisco," said Hong Mei Pang, immigrant rights program manager with San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action.

Pang said Trump threatened to cut off $1 billion but "actually only $250,000 can be immediately put on the chopping block".

"California has always been a leader when it comes to civil rights, and we have set the tone this time," said Sabiha Basrai of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, in Oakland.

Last month, the California legislature passed resolutions urging Trump to abandon his deportation promise and introduced two bills aimed at protecting immigrants. One measure would set up a fund to pay for lawyers for immigrants facing deportation and another would train criminal defense attorneys in immigration law.