As fears grow surrounding the Trump administration’s announcement that it will deport millions of undocumented immigrants, victims worried about their immigration status may not come forward to report crimes or cooperate with police, legal and academic scholars say.
Trump has promised to oversee the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. As of Jan. 30, just over a week since his inauguration, ICE has arrested over 5,500 undocumented immigrants, the agency reported.
“This is an unprecedented amount of immigration enforcement in the United States, at least in recent decades,” said Carmen Gutierrez, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied immigration and public safety. “Policy that has allowed local law enforcement to carry out immigration duties has been ongoing for since the mid-1990s or so.”
“So it’s not new, but it has been accelerating and Trump is hitting the gas.”
Dr. Charis Kubrin, a criminology and law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the heightened fears of deportation among immigrant communities are likely to cause reporting of crimes and cooperation to plummet. This will ultimately harm law enforcement’s efficacy, Kubrin explained, since police often do not observe most crimes happening in real time. Rather, officials respond to crime and rely on reporting from the community.
“With heightened social control of immigrants, like deportation, they’re going to be less likely to come forward with what they do know or share information with police,” Kubrin said. “In the end, it can hurt the prevention of crime in those areas.”
Even documented immigrants who aren’t at risk of deportation could be hesitant to come forward out of fear for friends or family members who are undocumented, researchers said.
“It puts law enforcement in a situation where they will face a lot of backlash of mistrust and a worsening of perception that the community has,” Gutierrez said, “which undermines their ability to carry out their job.”
However, a direct correlation, with data to back it up, can be difficult to prove. There’s no clear way of demonstrating whether people are choosing to not cooperate with police. If they don’t come forward, there is not always a way to actually know if someone has information to help law enforcement.
Among the flurry of executive orders that Trump has signed since returning to the Oval Office, he signed one to let federal agencies make agreements with state and local law enforcement that would allow them to act as federal immigration officers, “to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
“It’s still really unclear how state-level policies like SB 54 are going to interact with these national executive orders,” Kubrin said, referring to the California law limiting local law enforcement’s involvement in federal immigration enforcement. “Right now, there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of questions and a lot of concern.”
The Trump administration’s plan could have a significant impact on California, where, according to Pew Research, 1.8 million undocumented immigrants live as of 2022.
As part of their efforts, the Trump administration also rescinded a long-standing policy prohibiting immigration officers from operating in “sensitive” areas such as schools and churches.
“If you’re in a community outside of where you live, you may not know what police department policy is enforced in that particular area, whether they’re collaborating with enforcement or not,” said Susan Bibler Coutin, a UCI Law Professor specializing in immigration issues. “California prohibits collaboration in general, but people may be hesitant given the current climate.”
Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes released a statement on Monday, Jan. 27 clarifying the department’s policy on immigration enforcement.
“The Orange County Sheriff’s Department will provide for your safety and respond to your calls for service regardless of your immigration status,” Barnes said. “We do not, and never will, ask the immigration status of victims, witnesses, suspects or those who call to report crimes. We enforce state and local laws equally, without bias, and without concern for your citizenship. That has not and will not change.”
However, the statement won’t necessarily assuage fears gripping undocumented immigrants. In the same statement, Sheriff Barnes begrudged California’s law limiting local departments’ communication with ICE, per Senate Bill 54.
Also known as the California Values Act, the 2017 law prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from using resources on behalf of federal immigration enforcement agencies.
But law enforcement is able to notify ICE or Border Patrol of a person’s release or transfer if they had certain felony or high-level misdemeanor convictions.
“I have chosen to cooperate with ICE to the fullest extent provided by the law in order to prevent serious offenders from returning to the communities they have preyed upon,” the sheriff added.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco made a similar statement, assuring the public that the local department does not enforce federal immigration laws. However, he also disparaged SB54 and expressed his desire to see ICE given “ready-access” to jails to remove criminals.
“Our communities have been put at severe risk of harm from four years of horrific open border policies,” Bianco said. “The consequences are being made worse by sanctuary state laws.”
A 2020 study by Kubrin found that the introduction of SB54 had no significant impact on violent or property crime statewide, though conceded that experiences could vary across counties and communities.
In 2017, Gutierrez and and sociology professor David Kirk co-reviewed 20 years of studies that examined the connection between immigration and crime. The team concluded that immigration and crime were either not related or negatively related, meaning immigration caused crime to go down.
Additionally, Kirk’s work, including a NYC-based study published in 2012, showed that immigrant communities tend to be less cynical and distrustful of police compared to mixed or predominantly native-born communities and are more likely to cooperate.
“The implication is that the threat of deportation may alienate those very communities who tend to be supportive of and helpful to the police and the law,” Kirk said. “In short, it would appear to undermine public safety rather than enhance it.”
But in Huntington Beach, city officials say they see a different threat – to police – because the Justice Department has issued a memo to federal prosecutors to investigate state and local officials who do not enforce immigration laws.
“When (Trump border czar) Tom Homan takes to the camera and the podium and says we are going to go after state and local law enforcement officials as aggressively as we are the immigrants themselves … that hits home,” City Attorney Michael Gates said. “To allow (our cops) to be in legal jeopardy because of the sanctuary state law is, I think, absolutely unacceptable.”
In January, Huntington Beach declared itself a “non-sanctuary city.”
OC sheriff says immigration law a federal, not local, law enforcement responsibility