Huntington Beach was in a festive mood as protests over President Trump’s harsh immigration enforcement raids erupted in Southern California locales.
Trump supporters gathered for a demonstration last month, waving Trump 2024 and Make America Great Again banners at the intersection of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway. An adolescent held up a banner urging people to support their local ICE raid.
The conservative coastal town’s authorities had proclaimed Huntington coastal a nonsanctuary city months prior, so it wasn’t shocking. The city claimed that illegal immigration was the cause of an increase in crime at the time and sued the state over a legislation that restricted collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
At the time, Mayor Pat Burns declared, “Huntington Beach will not stand by and let the obstructionist sanctuary state law put our 200,000 residents at risk of harm from those who seek to commit violent crimes on U.S. soil.”
The discussion of the raids has been far more subdued elsewhere in Orange County, especially in areas with larger immigrant populations. The raids that have targeted workers and long-term residents have caused reluctance among Republicans who supported for Trump and support his efforts to deport criminals.
In a letter to Trump last week, a group of Republican lawmakers from California, including two who represent Orange County, urged him to order the Department of Homeland Security and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to concentrate their enforcement efforts on criminals rather than conducting the kind of sweeping raids that cause workplace disruption and terror.
The lawmakers, including Assemblymembers Diane Dixon (R-Newport Beach) and Laurie Davies (R-Laguna Niguel), stated that the fear is forcing essential workers out of crucial businesses, exacerbating California’s affordability dilemma for our citizens.
To provide undocumented immigrants with long-standing local ties with a route to legal status, they urged Trump to update the nation’s immigration system.
According to Orange Republican political organizer Jo Reitkopp, who supports Trump’s immigration policies, the nation is safer now that he is carrying out his campaign pledge to cleanse it of criminals.
Despite her belief that deportations should go on, her views on the raids have been tempered by the history of her own family. After meeting Reitkopp’s mother, her father, an undocumented immigrant from Sicily, was deported to Italy in the 1950s. Later, she added, he came back to the United States through a legal status option for immigrants.
“I do have a lot of compassion for people who came when they were five years old or don’t know their home country,” she remarked. Why they never become citizens is beyond me. They wouldn’t have been deported if they had.
The bulk of people arrested in the Los Angeles area in early June were men who had never been charged with a crime, despite Trump’s frequent claims that his administration is concentrating its deportation efforts on criminals.
Approximately 69% of individuals detained in the Los Angeles area between June 1 and June 10 had no previous conviction, and 58% had never been charged with a crime, according to a Times data analysis conducted in the early days of the enforcement activity.
Reitkopp stated that it is disheartening when people who have not committed crimes are apprehended during raids. However, she said, there is a bright side to the federal government’s offer for undocumented immigrants to self-deport and potentially have a chance to return.
“[Trump] is giving them an opportunity, even though it’s a bad scenario,” she remarked.
Many Orange County voters are not very fond of Trump’s deportation intentions, which he laid out during his campaign.
According to a January UC Irvine poll, just one-third of Orange County voters supported Trump on the matter. People without documentation should have the opportunity to achieve legal status, according to over 60% of residents surveyed.
Nearly three-quarters of Latino respondents preferred a legal status option, despite the fact that nearly half of white respondents favored deportations, according to the study.
According to 2019 data from the Migration Policy Institute, there are over 236,000 undocumented immigrants living in Orange County, most of whom were born in Mexico, Central America, or Asia. According to data available at the time, 67% of those without documentation were employed, and 33% had been in the country for at least 20 years.
The Orange County Business Council’s president and CEO, Jeffrey Ball, stated that he supports California lawmakers who advocate for concentrating immigration enforcement efforts on criminals rather than large sweeps.
Ball stated that when employees don’t feel safe at work, it’s not the kind of productive atmosphere you want from a business perspective, even though companies haven’t yet noticed any notable effects.
According to him, this immigrant community plays a significant role in our labor. Since there is still a labor shortage in this area, some of the issues we have with the productivity and dependability of the workforce are made worse to the degree that individuals are fleeing the area out of fear or discomfort.
Independent Christopher Granucci expressed concern about the indiscriminate character of the deportations, but acknowledging that illegal immigration has become an issue for many in Southern California.
Granucci stated, “I think they need to be laser-focused on the real criminals, even though we have millions and millions of people who came in.” I believe that everyone in the nation agrees that such offenders ought to be expelled.
As a teacher, Granucci has encountered pupils whose parents are either non-residents or working for residence.
“It would be much better if they could be more strategic about who is being removed,” Granucci added. Everyone is freaking out right now. Because of it, parents and students are both terrified.
The community has been hit more than ever by the news of the raids in Little Saigon, which includes sections of Westminster, Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, and Santa Ana.
The largest ethnic enclave outside of Vietnam is home to a huge number of undocumented Vietnamese people. However, activists claim that because of an agreement reached in 2008 between the United States and Vietnam, which permitted the majority of Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country prior to 1995—primarily refugees fleeing violence after the Vietnam War—to remain in the country, many were not worried about deportations for years.
A procedure for deporting such people was established in 2020 by an amended memorandum of understanding between the United States and Vietnam.
According to Tracy La, executive director of VietRISE, “what we’re seeing is that people who are immigrants themselves who support Trump’s deportation agenda only support it until it affects them.” Trump is targeting various communities, including Vietnamese, other Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians, and undocumented Latino immigrants. I believe that many of those who backed it have been struggling with that.
Mayor Ted Bui hasn’t encountered much public opposition to the raids in Fountain Valley, a city with a sizable Vietnamese American population where 32% of citizens identify as foreign-born. According to him, many of the Vietnamese Americans who reside there respect law and order and believe that the raids are just federal law enforcement officers performing their duties.
He stated he felt the same way.
After Saigon fell, Bui’s family left Vietnam, initially going to France, where his grandfather was a citizen. Later, he arrived in the US on a student visa to further his studies. He claimed to have gone through the citizenship process because he was enamored with the civility he encountered among Americans.
If we permit people to violate the law, what are we saying? Bui stated. Why do we have laws at all if we permit individuals to violate them? It would have no purpose, and our nation would be in anarchy.
Proposition 187, a statewide ballot initiative that would have denied illegal immigrants access to public services like healthcare and education, was first introduced in Orange County thirty years ago.
In 1994, the bill, which was approved 59% to 41%, would have mandated that teachers report any students they suspected of being in the country illegally to the appropriate authorities. However, the act was stopped by federal judges and never went into effect.
Orange County’s anti-illegal immigration attitude persisted well into the early 2000s. In 2005, Allan Mansoor, the mayor of Costa Mesa at the time, proposed training city police personnel to enforce immigration laws.
Even within Republican circles, immigration became a more complex subject as Orange County’s demographics continued to shift, moving from a dependable Republican bastion to a politically competitive area.
In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won Orange County, but by a much tighter margin than either Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020, cementing the county s position as a suburban battleground.
Days of protests were in downtown Santa Ana, a center for Latino immigrants in Orange County, after immigration raids. City officials have demanded that National Guard troops at the federal courthouse leave and have been working on ways to help those swept up and their families.
Santa Ana City Councilmember Thai Viet Phan, a Democrat, said even those who agree with Trump about better border protection are unnerved by raids outside Home Depots and at car washes.
According to Phan, there is a lot of sympathy. People voted for Trump based on a variety of things, principally the economy. However, I don’t believe they expected it to be this way.
