'What's Going to Happen to My Kids?': California Prepares to Resist Trump Deportations

When he was 18, Chanthon Bun recalled, he was the lookout during a Los Angeles robbery in which no one was hurt. He was sentenced to 50 years in state prison.

Incarcerated for 23 years, he was paroled in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bun had come to the United States as a refugee at age 6. He was born during the Cambodian Genocide when millions of people were put into work camps, separated from their families and killed by the communist group Khmer Rouge.

Although he’s a legal permanent resident of the United States, the 46-year-old is among the thousands of Californians who live in constant fear of deportation because of a past criminal conviction. That threat became even more serious earlier this month when Donald Trump was reelected. The president-elect has vowed to launch the biggest militarized mass deportation in U.S. history, and his team has since doubled down on those threats.

“I worry about what’s going to happen to my kids,” Bun said. “It’s like you’re not even here. Your mind is in such fear that you can’t even enjoy breathing.”

Immigration experts warn of an indiscriminate dragnet that could put almost anyone at risk, but some are in more immediate jeopardy than others. Those include noncitizens who have had contact with the criminal justice system, some 1.3 million people nationwide who have already received final orders of removal, and undocumented people who may live or work close to the other two groups.

“Folks who have had contact with the criminal legal system will be of high priority,” said Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the left-leaning Washington think tank American Immigration Council. “Under current immigration law, that includes people who might have convictions from decades prior. There’s no statute of limitations on when the government can remove someone.”

Communities closer to the border may be at greater risk early in the next Trump administration because that’s where more Customs and Border Protection agents and Border Patrol officials are located. Trump has said he plans to use those agencies to carry out his mass deportation plan.

For months, advocates have been planning ways to fight back.

“He doesn’t own our states,” said Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union. “And our states will be the frontline in the defense of our civil liberties and our civil rights.”

California, which has the country’s largest immigrant population, already has strong state laws to protect immigrant communities from mass deportations, although not as strong as Oregon and Illinois, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

Those two states have comprehensive laws restricting transfers of people to ICE, whereas California state prison employees regularly contact the federal immigration enforcement agency about inmates in their custody, including United States citizens, public records show. Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a national nonprofit that provides legal training and does pro-immigrant policy work in California and Texas, estimates 70% to 75% of ICE arrests in the interior of the U.S. are handoffs from another law enforcement agency, such as local jails or state or federal prisons.

During Trump’s first term, California led in resisting federal deportation of undocumented immigrants by becoming the first “sanctuary state” that curbed local agencies’ cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But before that law was signed, it was weakened to allow state prisons to continue their coordination with ICE and to give federal immigration agents access to interview people in prisons and jails. Protections that limited police agencies sharing data with ICE were also weakened to allow for information to be provided if a person has been convicted of one of some 800 crimes.

The day after Trump’s second election, Gov. Gavin Newsom summoned the Legislature, dominated by his fellow Democrats, to a special session starting Dec. 2 — vowing to “protect California values” as the state braces for renewed clashes with the incoming administration.

‘There is no price tag’

Trump’s political ascent was fueled by racist and xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants: At a December 2023 campaign rally in New Hampshire, for instance, he said they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” He’s promised to expend massive federal resources on raids and sweeps in immigrant communities, especially in ‘sanctuary cities.’ One goal is to discourage future illegal immigration.

“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice,” he recently told NBC. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

A majority of registered voters — 56% — agree with enforcing mass deportations (PDF) of immigrants living in the country illegally, according to the Pew Research Center. In a separate survey by Data for Progress, 67% of voters say they supported deporting an undocumented person who has a criminal record for a non-violent offense.

In California, immigrant advocates want the state to step up again.

“We’re looking to California to provide leadership,” said Alex Mensing with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. “We fully expect California to stand up to ICE’s terror as a state. We fully expect the state to put as much creativity and as many resources as possible toward supporting a response that defends immigrants.”

In an interview with CalMatters, Attorney General Rob Bonta said Friday his office is preparing legal challenges and bracing for “a full frontal assault on our immigrant communities.”

“We are ready to file,” he added. “We have been thinking about and preparing and readying ourselves for the possibility of this moment for months.”

Bonta said his office has been carefully watching and listening to what the president-elect and his team say they are planning, “and, thankfully, he’s telling us what he’s going to do.”

“The Trump administration 1.0 told us one thing: that Trump is unable to not break the law. It’s his brand. He does what he wants to do, when he wants to and how he wants to, regardless of the Constitution or federal law. And by doing that, he breaks the law,” Bonta said. “That’s why our job is so important to be there when he does and to stop him from doing it.”

The state’s attorney general office spent about $10 million a year in legal expenses fighting Trump during the last administration, Bonta acknowledged, but “you can’t put a price on freedom, on rights, on democracy. It is always the right time and the right thing to protect those rights.” During the last Trump administration, California’s attorneys successfully defended protections for people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, for example.

For years, the Golden State has been increasing protections for immigrants.

This year, California passed a law that will allow county health workers to inspect inside federal immigration detention centers where there has been a long documented history of medical neglect and worker safety violations. In 2023, the state fined the for-profit prison operator Geo Group $100,000 for six workplace violations, including lacking a plan to control COVID-19 spread and failure to provide information and training on hazardous chemicals.

Advocates say more could be done, such as strengthening data protections in local police agencies and preventing state prison staff from coordinating with ICE.

The governor could pardon immigrants with old criminal records, shielding them from deportation. Newsom has done it when certain refugees faced removal due to old cases, like Bun’s, but Newsom’s clemency rate has been lower than that of other governors.

“Gov. Newsom has pardoned far fewer people than Gov. Brown,” said Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney of the San Francisco public defender’s office. “Thus far, in his six years in office, Gov. Newsom has granted 186 pardons, an average of 31 per year. By contrast, Gov. Brown issued 1,332 pardons during his third and fourth terms as governor, an average of 166 pardons per year.”

There are limits to what California can do. Lots of legal issues remain unresolved and will be battled out in court. Most sanctuary laws have a caveat that says local law enforcement cannot cooperate with immigration authorities “unless required by a valid court order.” Experts said what constitutes a valid court order might become an issue for the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court let California’s sanctuary law stand in 2020 by not hearing a Trump challenge to it.

The state also can’t do much about military troops entering California. The president can federalize the National Guard. In 2018, Trump sent nearly 6,000 active-duty service members to the border, authorizing them to perform “military protective activities.”

“It’s going to have to be fought out in the courts,” said Shawn VanDiver, a national security expert.

Some of the avenues Trump is exploring to deploy the military, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, would require an invasion by a foreign government, some lawyers say. Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who argued challenges to immigration restrictions during Trump’s first term, said the president-elect’s plan to use the military is illegal, and the civil liberties organization was already preparing legal challenges.

“Trump is going to do everything that he can get away with,” Mensing said.

However, there are limits to what Trump can do, too, particularly based on the resources he’d need to deliver on some of his campaign promises.

The president-elect has said he plans to carry out a million deportations a year. The highest number of deportations in a single fiscal year in recent history was fiscal year 2012 — during the Obama administration — with 407,821 deportations across the United States. During Trump’s first term, he was only able to carry out several hundred thousand removals a year, about on par with other presidents, at least partly because of California and other states’ new sanctuary laws.

According to the American Immigration Council, the long-term cost of deporting one million people annually could average $88 billion annually, which would be higher than the Department of Homeland Security’s $62 billion budget in fiscal year 2025. It would also require massive expansions of federal immigration court systems and detention facilities.

Deportations from California have reached record lows in recent years following the changes in state law and policy about ICE pick-ups and new federal regulations about COVID-19 testing before pick-ups at state prisons, public records show.

‘Power not panic’

Advocates are emphasizing the need for community preparedness and organization to combat the anticipated crackdown on immigrants in California.

“There are a lot of people actively preparing, and I think community members should take heart in that and also participate,” Mensing said. “Ultimately, that is what is going to prevent Trump from getting what he wants, which is to terrorize people.”

In immigrant communities across the state, advocates are helping those at risk of detention and deportation make emergency plans, including who will pick up their children from school and how to protect their assets in the United States. “Know your rights” workshops are being organized, and neighbors are helping each other get informed.

“Power not panic” is a mantra Mensing and others often repeat. “Trump is going to attack sanctuary cities and sanctuary states because he is vindictive. Our main tools are to be organized and to be informed,” he said.

Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program, a Quaker organization, said even people with some form of legal status and protection are concerned.

“The amount of worry and the amount of uncertainty that people have is just tremendous, and what I tell people is to find a supportive community and to not be alone at this time,” Rios said. He said he was asked to talk to a 6-year-old child “because what he had been hearing in his school terrified him.”

Bun said his phone has also been ringing nonstop with urgent calls from fellow Cambodian refugees across the country. Meanwhile, he’s been trying to figure out how to tell his own 3-year-old son that there might be a knock on the door, and he’ll be gone forever.

“This is like planning a life sentence,” he said. “How could you plan for that?”

Journalism engineer Mohamed Al Elew contributed to this report.