As immigrant roundups begin, judge freezes Trump order denying birthright citizenship

Church members hold hands during a service at St. Rita of Cascia Parish in Chicago, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025. | Nam Y. Huh

KERN COUNTY, Calif.—Alejandra, an undocumented farmworker in California’s lush Central Valley, kept her five-year-old son home from school even before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, as word spread through the fields and farms of the key agricultural region of ICE immigration agents’ raids there.

School is too far from home for her son to walk. So Alejandra drives–or drove—him to school every day before she went to toil in the fields, and she picked him up after class. But now she’s afraid to do so. ICE agents may nab her in front of the school, or even inside it. They couldn’t do so before now.

Latino-hating Republican President Donald Trump’s new executive order on January 20 turned ICE loose to arrest, detain and deport the nation’s 10 million-11 million undocumented people. Racial profiling policies allow ICE to barge into her school and grab Alejandra and her son, because of their skin color.

And many of Alejandra’s colleagues didn’t come to work that week, for the same reason, fear of ICE. Growers estimated three-fourths of their workers failed to show after the combination of the raids and Trump’s edict.

Trump’s order denying automatic citizenship to people born in the U.S. has now put on pause by a federal judge, helping illustrate a key point: The Constitution declares Immigration policy is a federal responsibility. And the national government must follow strict standards in executing it. And it can’t shanghai state and local governments—and cops—to do its bidding.

So if Illinois, California, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, to name a few, declare themselves “sanctuaries” for migrants, ICE can still come in and raid for people, picking them up off the streets. But it can’t co-opt or force the Chicago police, the NYPD or the Chicago Public Schools to help.

It also must follow due process of law for anyone in the U.S., as the Supreme Court ruled about a decade ago in a case pitting New York against the first Trump administrations. That’s a concept, though, that D.C.’s ruling Republicans appear to be brushing aside in their zeal to rid the nation of Spanish-speaking people.

Says they won’t back down

Griesa Martinez Rojas, herself an undocumented worker and Executive Director of United We Dream—the organization that speaks for kids whom their undocumented parents brought to the U.S., at very young ages—says they won’t back down from the Trump threat. But migrants need support from across the board -,political, civic and moral.

“The responsibility to keep our community safe does not fall upon immigrants alone,” Martinez Rojas, told a Working Families Party forum called January 23 on resisting Trump.

“Trump and the billionaires do not care about everyday people like us—immigrants or undocumented or U.S. citizens,” she added. That means, she added, that it is everyone’s responsibility to defend the migrants, and U.S. values.

“None of us is made safer or better off because Trump and the billionaires running our government with him, unleashed ICE and the military to rip children from their classrooms, workers from their worksites, and family members from their homes,” she added on United We Dream’s website.

Trump’s anti-immigrant order plays to his white nationalist supporters, but also into the interests of the corporate class. The Economic Policy Institute calculates immigrants pumped at least $4.6 trillion into the U.S. economy, far more than they receive.

That’s despite a “system that is unjust and misused by some businesses who profit from exploiting workers, and by some bigots who sow fear, hate, and division for political gain.”

“The flaws in the immigration system are no accident: The federal policymakers who refuse to fix them and the businesses who profit from those flaws possess intertwined financial and political interests in maintaining a broken, unjust system.”

Economics never entered Trump’s mind, or those of the ICE agents in the farm raid, plus raids the past two days in Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota, Maryland and elsewhere. Agents rounded up people with zeal and glee and no regard for their migration status, only for their skin color.

In the first day and a half since Trump’s anti-migrant, border-closing executive order, ICE arrested 460 migrants and ordered states to hand over 420 more, currently serving jail time, when their sentences expire. Arrests sometimes were in “sanctuary cities” in Illinois and California, gloated Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan. He did not specify which cities.

“There’s not only public safety threats that will be arrested, because in sanctuary cities, we’re not allowed to get that public safety threat in the jail, which means we got to go to the neighborhood and find him.”

Meanwhile, the Republican-run Congress magnified the threat by passing a GOP “messaging” bill, the Laken-Riley Act. It turns state Attorneys General  and the officers they control loose on  the migrants, too, with even fewer restraints.

Wants to sow fear

Trump’s goal in the roundups, which he now extends to churches, hospitals, shelters for battered and threatened women, schools and elsewhere, is not just to detain and deport the nation’s immigrants but to sow fear among people of color and eventually everyone else.

That’s even though U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle issued a nationwide injunction two days later against enforcing one part of Trump’s dictate, which would have stripped birthright citizenship from kids like Alejandra’s son.  Four states, including Illinois, Arizona and Oregon, had sued to overturn Trump’s edict.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said.

Governors such as California Democrat Gavin Newsom and Illinois Democrat J.B. Pritzker and cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York—whose current mayor, Eric Adams, is wavering—ban local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. Trump’s order declares such “sanctuaries” will lose all federal funds. The Supreme Court, in a ruling written by then-Chief Justice Roberts during the first Trump administration said the Federal government cannot “cherry-pick” jurisdictions that do not conduct immigration policy when it comes to provision federal aid. The Constitution, he noted, allows jurisdictions to decide whether they want to implement things for which the federal government is responsible, in this case immigration policy.

The Kent County farm raids netted more than 200 people. The victims were bussed to El Centro, a four-hour drive away, prior to being thrown out of the country

The fate of those farmworkers prompted a raft of protective measures on the state and local levels. They include use of churches as temporary shelters, people who house immigrants flatly lying to ICE agents and even, in Chicago, a topic of collective bargaining.

One demand of the Chicago Teachers Union, in its current negotiations with the city system’s Chancellor and board, is to make city schools into sanctuaries, especially for kids who suddenly find themselves orphaned when both parents are arrested, detained and deported.

Meantime, political advocates for the  migrants—and leaders of pro-migrant groups—are fighting back.

But now they have to battle Congress, too. The Laken-Riley Act went through the Senate. The House passed it 263-156, with all the Republicans and 46 Democrats voting for it. It’s headed to Trump,

The measure, S5, would give anti-immigrant state attorneys general, “such as far-right Republican Texan Ken Paxton overreaching power to arrest, detain, and ultimately deport immigrants en masse and without due process, a constitutional right that every single person should be guaranteed,” one summary says. A migrant stopped for a broken taillight could wind up being deported without trial.

“The elderly immigrant selling fruit on the street corner would be a target. The young, single mom selling candy bars in the subway station would be a target.” Dreamers “with a minor traffic violation would be a target,” the summary adds.

“Our Black and brown neighbors around the country would become targets by simply going about their lives—subject to racial profiling by law enforcement that already discriminates against our communities.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.