Trump's Immigration Raids and State Pushback

Jennifer Chacon: Any aspect of domestic policy can be tied to an immigration enforcement objective. And so when we continue to try to say immigration is exceptional and deserves a special set of rules, we can expect that this administration can use that exceptionalism to undercut all manner of a state or locality’s preference around policing, around education, around healthcare, because all of those things are inexplicably joined with immigration in a nation where 15% of the population is immigrant.

Rich Ford: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I’m Rich Ford. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app, that way you’ll have access to all of our new episodes as soon as they’re available today.

Political commentators have attributed immigration and the surge of immigration at the southern border during Joe Biden’s term, as a key factor in President’s Trump’s successful campaign for a second shot at the White House. And since taking office, border crossings are at their lowest point in 50 years. But Trump also promised to deport undocumented immigrants already in the country, who he claimed were responsible for violent crime, unemployment among citizens, even missing pets. Many worried that deportations would involve a much more serious disruption to established communities than border control did.

And so in today’s discussion, we’re looking at Trump’s efforts inside the U.S. where the deployment of federal border and ICE agents have led to an unprecedented surge in armed and masked personnel on the streets of cities, largely Democratic cities, Los Angeles, Portland, and of course, most recently Minneapolis, with the tragic consequence of the death of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January.

Here to help explain some of the key legal issues related to immigration under the Trump administration is Jennifer Chacón, my colleague at Stanford Law School, where she teaches and researches about the issues that arise at the nexus of immigration law, constitutional law, criminal law, and procedure—highlighting how legal frameworks on immigration and law enforcement shape individual and collective understandings of racial and ethnic identity, citizenship, civic engagement, and social belonging. She’s the co-author of an immigration law case book, Immigration Law and Social Justice, now in its second edition, and the co-author of Legal Phantoms [published] by Stanford University Press, which explores how the past decade shifting immigration policies have shaped and been shaped by immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Chacón: Thank you so much.

Rich Ford: So, can we start by talking about the current immigration situation in the U.S. a bit more than a year into the second Trump administration?

The country seems to be in shock after the deployment of federal border and ICE agents to various cities—masked agents that have come in unmarked vehicles carrying heavy assault weapons, and particularly, of course, after the tragic shootings and deaths in Minneapolis. Maybe worth noting that in Minneapolis up to 3,000 border agents were on the streets in a city with only 600 regular police officers, relatively low crime rates, and low levels of undocumented immigration. What’s your assessment of the situation of this immigration or anti-immigration push on the ground right now?

Jennifer Chacón: Yes, I think what we’re seeing is in some ways and an effort on the part of the Trump administration to fulfill a campaign promise. But I also think we’re seeing a mismatch between what people thought they were voting for and what the administration wants to do. And so I think … we could all remember the president’s rhetoric in campaigning, and that really focused on the deportation of groups of people that he called “criminal aliens.” So presumably those individuals who committed violence in their communities and should be deported. But what we’re seeing, of course, is a set of enforcement practices that are targeted much more broadly. This isn’t really surprising to anybody who had ever focused on immigration policy before the election, but I think it is surprising to many of the people who were caught up in the campaign rhetoric. So, I think many people assume that large numbers of unauthorized migrants are in the country committing heinous acts of crime. Some of those acts of crime are elevated by the media because they’re sensational and sensationalistic.

But I think the reality is that the vast majority of unauthorized migrants that are in the country have no criminal record and no contact with a criminal legal system. That in fact all of the data show that they are less likely to have contact with a criminal legal system than citizens who are similarly situated.

So, it’s unsurprising that there just aren’t vast numbers of  “criminal aliens” that are low hanging fruit for the administration to remove. And so instead, what this has become is a campaign that really is targeting pretty much anyone who’s present in the country without authorization, as well as a significant number of people who have or have had legal status. And we can see the administration removing legal status for various groups and then targeting those groups for deportation as well.

Rich Ford: Yes. One of the things the last time we spoke about this that really struck me, was you mentioned …  just now you mentioned that this isn’t surprising to anyone who’s actually studied the issue, but it might be surprising to other people. But the last time we spoke, you mentioned that there was really no way of implementing the Trump administration’s agenda without it affecting large numbers of Americans, both citizens and non-citizens. Something like what we’re seeing now in places like Minneapolis. Could you say a little bit more about why that is?

Jennifer Chacón: Sure. So, I think …. one of the things that you said in introducing this segment was really important to highlight. You noted the numbers of border apprehensions, and indeed border encounters, are really way down from where they had been under President Biden and actually way down from where they’ve been anytime over the last 20 or more years.

Border encounters at the southern border are at historically low levels. There are multiple reasons, both that they surged under President Biden and that they’re lower now. President Biden’s administration was dealing with a backlog of people coming to the southern border who had been prevented from seeking asylum or entering under the COVID protocols, so there were all of those people. There was massive political upheaval in turmoil in Venezuela that pushed large numbers of people from Venezuela to the southern border. And so the combined promise of actually having asylum pathways open again with larger numbers of people who were seeing political violence and other forms of chaos in their home countries, really spurred this large group of people to come to the border. And the Biden administration spent much of its time trying to move those people into legal pathways, get people into channels to handle their asylum claim, and much of that really stoked some public pushback. Too many people were seen as coming in, too many people were seen as being given pathways.

And in some cases people, some people wo were recent arrivals were being given forms of protected status like TPS or humanitarian parole that long-term undocumented residents hadn’t had access to. So here was also some … felt unfairness and chaos to the way that this unfolded.

That said, there were lots of external forces that were really producing this dynamic. When Trump came into office, he made it very clear that there was going to be no asylum processing, that people who had humanitarian parole and temporary protected status were going to lose it. And so this doesn’t mean that the external factors have been solved, but it does mean that if you are fearing political persecution in your home country or facing violence or other displacement due to any sorts of widespread disasters, your first thought is not going to be to come to the United States at this time, right? Because there’s a sense that those pathways are closed. So that reduces the number of border apprehensions, the external policy.

And of course, the Biden administration had really handled … and you could see the number of border apprehensions really falling at the last part of the Biden administration … had really handled the backlog. So, although it looked chaotic on the ground, there were a lot of systems in place that were really making that line trend down. So, it was already trending down and then Trump came in and basically declared the border closed.

So if there’s nobody to apprehend or very small numbers of people to apprehend at the southern border and you have a very large immigration enforcement budget with Congress handing you billions of extra dollars as they did in the middle of this fiscal year, that enforcement energy is going to be focused on interior policing, and that is what we’re seeing. So, ICE agents, Customs and Border protection agents who are operating in places like Minneapolis and Portland right? Shifting their energies from the southern border and southern border, apprehension to cities all across America and not just cities. There was a story in the New York Times today about a massive immigration rate in rural Idaho. So it is happening all over the country, with more pushback, I think, in places where the politics of place lead to higher disjuncture between what the Trump administration wants and what local communities want. And that pushback is part of what we’re seeing in places like Minneapolis.

So those are the facts on the ground that we’re facing. Huge immigration enforcement budgets, huge ramping up of hiring in ICE and CBP, and nowhere for those energies to go except to police within the United States.

Rich Ford: I see, and I want to come back to the question of the pushback in a moment. But first: one thing that you touched on was …  Trump closed the border, and essentially closing the border, meaning we don’t take any asylum cases despite the fact that the United States continues to have obligations under international law to consider legitimate asylum cases. I want to talk a little bit about that, but also about other ways in which the Trump administration’s approach to dealing with immigration, whatever you think about the goal, is in tension with the law.

So, for instance, another example of that involves the use of race and racial profiling in the immigration crackdown. Can you say a little bit about how that’s happening and what’s going on in the courts with respect to that?

Jennifer Chacón: Sure. So in some ways the Trump administration is not an author of racial profiling in immigration enforcement. We have a long history of the use of race in immigration enforcement in this country. But it does represent retrogression on the issue of the use of race in immigration enforcement.

And here’s what I mean by that. The Court, in 1975, in a case called Brignoni-Ponce, said that trained border patrol agents could rely on race as one factor when they were making a determination as to whether an individual … whether there was reasonable suspicion that an individual was present in violation of the law or committing an immigration crime. Those are two different things, but I will, for purposes of this discussion, sort of conflate them.

So reasonable suspicion of that immigration violation. In the case of Brignoni-Ponce, it was a crime. It was the crime of human smuggling that he was arrested for. And so the idea that you could use race as a factor is embedded then in U.S. law in 1975, and that’s a notable date, right? Because you’re realizing this is 10 years after the civil rights revolution, the passage of major legislation that’s really striving to eliminate the invidious use of race in in U.S. legal systems. And yet, at the same time, the Court is saying, it’s fine to treat people who have “Mexican appearance” differently in policing, and this was uncomfortable at the time. There’s a strong dissent pointing out the problems with this approach.

But it became increasingly uncomfortable as time went on for two reasons. One reason is that the demographics of the country have shifted substantially. So lots and lots of people “appear Mexican,” particularly when we think of Mexican appearance as something that’s not either limited to, nor exclusive among, Mexicans, right? It encompasses many Latino/a people who are, who would be characterized as “appearing Mexican.” So that’s like a good chunk of Southern California, a good chunk of south Texas, a good chunk of Arizona, right? Many people. And so the idea that this is going to be a useful thing to take into account in policing immigration becomes much more problematic.

The demographics of who’s undocumented has shifted. So many more people from Asia as they overstay their visas become undocumented. 40% of the undocumented population is visa overstays. It’s a much more diverse population. So this category, this type of idea that undocumented people will have “Mexican appearance” is both wildly over inclusive and also under inclusive. It just doesn’t make sense. So demographically that doesn’t work anymore. At the same time, the Equal Protection jurisprudence from the Court has really shifted when it comes to how we think about the use of race. So in 1975, you could use race in affirmative action, for example. In 2025, you can’t use race for that or any benign purpose, or invidious purpose. There it becomes much more uncomfortable to say, and yet we’re going to rely on race explicitly when policing something that has serious negative.

So this shift was something that the Ninth Circuit picked up on really 25 years ago. They said it doesn’t make sense in Southern California to rely on something like “Mexican appearances” and racial notion when policing immigration. And so in the Ninth Circuit for really over two decades, it has been impermissible to use race in policing immigration. And so this was true in federal courts and it was an argument the government couldn’t use, though they could use it in other parts of the country when they were policing in Southern California.

So, when we get to 2025, we saw the ACLU successfully litigate some of the stops that were happening in Southern California. We saw that the Trump administration, the Customs and Border Protection agents and ICE agents in Southern California were relying heavily on race as one of the factors that they were taking into account when they were deciding who to stop for potential immigration violations.

Going to places like Home Depot parking lots or car washes and just assuming that because it was a place of low-income work, where someone “appeared Mexican” or perhaps spoke Spanish, that this was sufficient evidence of an immigration violation. And of course, what we know from the ACLU litigation there, that meant that a lot of citizens and legally present immigrants, were caught up in these raids, were subject to questions, sometimes were detained for very lengthy periods of time that far exceed a lawful stop. And so we can see that the reliance on race is problematic, leads unsurprisingly to lots of people who are not the proper subject of immigration enforcement being caught up in this dynamic, and really doesn’t fit with the idea that there’s reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation.

You can’t tell by looking at someone in Southern California, walking down the street or working in their job, that they’re undocumented. And so, I think we need new approaches to policing immigration and this idea that you can street police on appearance doesn’t make sense.

And yet, although a District Court stayed the practice  … or issued a temporary restraining order of that practice, and the Ninth Circuit upheld that temporary restraining order, we saw the Supreme Court step in, essentially to stop that temporary restraining order from being in effect, so that temporary restraining order is no longer in effect while the litigation continues. So at this time, with the Supreme Court’s assist on the shadow docket without an accompanying order with reasoning, we have racial profiling happening not just in Southern California, but also in Minneapolis, where the data is showing that Somali communities and Latino communities are being stopped. Overwhelmingly citizens and lawfully present immigrants are being caught up in these stops. So some people are being policed differently because of what they look like. It seems antithetical to the values that we have in this country around what should happen, although, as perhaps consonant with our long histories of policing. But it does seem like the Supreme Court’s intervention here has really greenlighted, a set of practices that are at odds with the sorts of legal frameworks that seem to govern the rest of American life in 2026.

Rich Ford: We’ll see what happens when the Supreme Court finally gives us a judgment on the merits with respect to that. But it is striking when you mention affirmative action that one of the examples that Chief Justice John Roberts used in the Students for Fair Admissions case, involved the fact that universities didn’t make appropriate distinctions between people of Latino ancestry, that they didn’t bother to distinguish between Mexican-Americans and people from south America in implementing an affirmative action policy, and this is precisely what’s happening in enforcement actions, where we’re going to stop people who look Mexican or look like they might be undocumented. A theme that’s now coming forward that I’d like to expand on is the way these aggressive immigration enforcements might be, in some sense, degrading other areas of civic life. For instance, our policing, which, as you say, has never been perfect and has often had a component of racial injustice as part of it, but in many respects was getting better. Now perhaps is getting worse in, at least in the context of immigration enforcement. How’s that relating to local law enforcement?

Another issue that’s come up is the striking number of court orders that the administration has just ignored with respect to immigration enforcement. Chief Judge Patrick Schitz, who was appointee of George W. Bush, noted with a great deal of dismay that it appears that at least in 74 different cases, people the administration ignored court orders for people that were wrongly detained. Do you have any comment about that and the phenomenon of whether the judiciary is able to deal with unlawful uses of authority here?

Jennifer Chacón: Yes. Two great questions. One on sort of the overall impact on policing and then one on what the judiciary can do and whether there’s unprecedented or at least unusual patterns of behavior from the administration when it comes to court orders.

On the first point on local law enforcement, I think you’re absolutely right that this changes the character of local policing. And it happens in a lot of different ways. But one way that I can highlight is that … lawyers generally know that in criminal proceedings, if the government acts unlawfully in searching or seizing evidence then in many cases that evidence is subject to suppression in the criminal trial.

The idea here is that you disincentivize law enforcement from engaging in illegal activity. And then one way to disincentivize them is to say, “you’re not going to be able to use this in criminal prosecution.” The Supreme Court’s limited that in a number of ways in the criminal context, but it’s important to note that it has never operated in the immigration context.

So in 1984, in a case called Lopez-Mendoza, the court said the immigration proceedings are unrelated to the criminal proceedings and to criminal policing, and we have no evidence that the INS is engaged in widespread violations of people’s rights, so there’s really no need for a suppression remedy in immigration courts.

So one of the practical consequences of this is, even if local law enforcement behaves in a way that, say, unlawfully racially profiles or results in an illegal seizure or results in an illegal search of some kind, that evidence which might not be admissible in a criminal court for a local or for a state criminal proceeding, is admissible in immigration courts and can be used against immigrants in a variety of ways. And in many cases, you don’t even need that evidence in immigration courts because if people are undocumented, then that’s an easy route anyway.

So, this has the effect on local law enforcement that they’re not worried as much about some of the constraining effects of the criminal legal process because that is not the system that they’re going to be worried about interfacing with. They’re going to be interfacing with a much more permissive civil process. So, you have states and localities that have really tried to shore up that barrier by decreasing state and local law enforcement cooperation with the federal government, places like California. But you also have jurisdictions that have really tried to streamline and reinforce that cooperation—places like Texas and Florida. And in those places, I think some of the kinds of violations that you see immigration enforcement agents engaging in trickle down to other spaces because there’s less concern about the constraining effects of criminal procedural protections on court orders.

A lot of this has come up in the context of detention, immigration detention. In immigration detention, it’s important to note is civil detention, this has nothing to do with criminal law, has nothing to do with criminal procedures, and it doesn’t come out as a result of a crime. It’s just that you are in immigration proceedings and under the statute you may be subject to detention during those immigration proceedings. It’s a civil detention. Congress has mandated that some categories of immigrants are subject to mandatory detention, meaning that, even if they are personally not a flight risk, even if they are personally no danger to their community, they are still subject, under these categorical laws, to mandatory detention throughout the pendency of their immigration proceedings. For many years, in fact since these mandatory detention provisions were really shaped in 1996, that was not read to encompass the individuals who had entered without inspection, but who had been present in the country for a long period of time. The Trump administration has reinterpreted the mandatory detentions provisions and has decided that if you entered without inspection, you are seeking an admission and therefore subject to the same mandatory detention provisions that would govern somebody who newly arrives at the border.

So millions of people who have lived here for decades are suddenly subject to the possibility of mandatory detention with no possibility of bail and no adjudication of whether they pose a danger or a flight risk, for as long as it takes for the administration to adjudicate their claim. No possibility of release. This interpretation of the statute is something that many federal judges have rejected in habeas proceedings. They find that’s not what the statute says. They find it’s inconsistent with some more recently passed laws and certainly inconsistent with the government’s practice for the past 30 years.

So, they’re saying, “release these people, you’re holding them unlawfully.” That is the habeas action. The Trump administration, either because they’re insufficiently staffed or because they’re insufficiently concerned about these orders, has been pretty slow to release some of these people, and that’s the order that you referenced and this is not unique to situations in his courthouse, but the idea is they’re just not getting these people out of detention.

So courts are ordering their release and immigrants are still sitting in detention. And this is a pretty troublesome set of circumstances where you have longtime residents of the U.S. who have deep ties to the community, family members, jobs, church communities, etc., who are now subject suddenly to a mandatory detention provision according to the administration, with courts rejecting that interpretation, who are still sitting in overcrowded immigration detention facilities where the conditions are increasingly troubling.

Rich Ford: Do you have a sense of how much of the reason for this is a lack of adequate staffing from the administration, and how much of it is just recalcitrance? I’m thinking of an example, for instance, recently of a lawyer who was faced with … was getting dressed down by a judge and broke down and said, “this job sucks, the system sucks I’m working 24 hours a day and I can’t process all these cases.” So that sounds like they’re overworked because they don’t have adequate staff for this big onslaught of new cases. But there are also some indications that maybe the administration doesn’t agree with what the judges have said, and so they’re just not going to comply.

Jennifer Chacón: Yeah, so I actually view these two things as interrelated, right? It’s not a question of, what if it is over-defiance, and what if it is inadequate staffing?

It’s a deliberate decision from the top to engage in a set of policing practices, detention practices, and adjudication practices, knowing that there is insufficient capacity to do this in a constitutional way, right? That is a choice that’s been made from Trump to Miller on down. And once you’ve made that choice, the end result is your people are not going to be able to comply with court orders. And you knew that from the beginning, right? And so, I think what that’s what we’re seeing, is a mandate from the top that there is no state capacity to implement and the inevitable result is going to be a set of constitutional violations. And that’s what we’re watching.

Rich Ford: Jennifer, I imagine many of our listeners are wondering what states like Minnesota can do in the face of this type of aggressive immigration enforcement. And you’ve written an article where you describe the potential role of states and local governments in what you call rebalancing immigration law and immigration enforcement. Could you give us a few examples of how states and local governments might have a role to play in this area?

Jennifer Chacón: Yeah, so I think one of the questions that many people are asking is: is there a role for state or local governments to push back to develop alternative sets of policies and procedures? And one of the difficulties, of course, is that immigration law is, and has always been understood to be a federal function. So the federal government gets to decide who gets to come in and on what terms and when they need to be deported. At the same time, Congress has left a lot of space in the immigration laws for states and localities to do the things that they do in governing their residents, right?

So, whether that’s setting their own educational policies, tuition policies. Whether that’s setting the policies that they have around the obligations of their state and local law enforcement to interface with federal officials, right? Those have always been within the state’s domain and immigration law, the existence of it, and the rules around it, don’t displace that unless Congress says that it does.

And there are many places where states and localities have room to act. And so one of the places that we’ve seen states and localities acting is in deciding that they don’t want to expend state and local resources on immigration enforcement. These are sometimes called sanctuary jurisdictions—that label is deceptive for many reasons, right? It doesn’t displace the ability of the federal government to enforce federal law within those spaces, but it does mean that the states and localities are not going to voluntarily engage in cooperation efforts with the federal government for which they’re not compensated and which may be at odds with their own goals. So that’s one way that we’ve seen jurisdictions pushing back by saying, “we’re not going to share information with you about, who’s in our jail facilities. There’s nothing in federal law that requires us to do this thing and we’re not going to do it.” And we have well established constitutional law that says that it’s okay for states not to. Actually, those established cases come in context like gun regulations, where the state doesn’t want to participate in the enforcement of federal gun regulations and the Supreme Court said, that is fine. You don’t have to, so you…

Rich Ford: Officers can’t be commandeered…

Jennifer Chacón: They cannot be commandeered to do this work and immigration is the same. There’s no reason that a local sheriff, a county sheriff, or a local police officer needs to do the federal government’s work for it, unless that is something that is consistent with their obligations to the state. So that’s one space where we’ve seen state government doing some work to at least minimize some of the role of federal immigration enforcement in their jurisdiction.

Rich Ford: And there’s some push in or there, there’s some a little bit of a tug of war with respect to this and the Trump administration in Minneapolis, right? That part of what some of the Trump officials have said is if you cooperated more, we wouldn’t need to send in so many ICE agents.

Jennifer Chacón: Yeah. So that I think is just deceptive, right? So what they’re saying is, “if you’ll tell us who’s in your jails, right, if then we don’t have to be here at all.” And the bottom line is that first of all any jurisdiction, including jurisdictions like California, of course, that are sanctuary jurisdictions, have massive carve outs in their non-sharing laws for individuals who have committed violent crimes and other kinds of categories of crime that the federal government had said was their highest priority. So these jurisdictions, even the ones that call themselves sanctuaries, are sharing the information about the “worst of the worst.” And I reject that label, but that’s the label that the Trump administration has used, and it is just not true that these localities haven’t been sharing that kind of information.

So that to me is one of the troubling things about those assertions. And then the second thing is the way that the conversation is framed, right? Because you’re not sharing all of the information we want, which is, even if you arrested a long-time resident who had for a traffic violation, you’re not giving us that information, which might happen in a sanctuary jurisdiction. That means that we have to deploy 3,000 agents in order to effectuate this, not by doing careful investigation into who has committed violent crime, and then using a judicial warrant to arrest that person, but instead by standing on the streets and trying to determine who’s unauthorized based on what they look like, what language they’re speaking and what they’re doing. Those are two different missions. They are not fulfilling the first mission by doing the second. So, I think it’s … and I guess the final point is, and I think Minneapolis, Chicago, other cities have tried to make this argument. At some point, this too looks like commandeering. If your argument is you have to give us the data or we will not take our 3,000 troops out of your city, it starts to look really very much like you are forcing the states and localities to do your bidding in immigration enforcement. And that is what that has the feeling of. The final thing…

Rich Ford: An unconstitutional condition.

Jennifer Chacón: Yeah. The final thing that I want to say about this though, because I’ve been hearing a lot of people say, well, they’ve asked for information about the voting rolls, and that has nothing to do with immigration, and I think what troubles me about that is anything could be made to be something about immigration. So the voting rolls are, in some ways, about immigration. If your argument is that undocumented people are voting, which is the administration’s claim. Any aspect of domestic policy can be tied to an immigration enforcement objective. And so when we continue to try to say immigration is exceptional and deserves a special set of rules, we can expect that this administration can use that exceptionalism to undercut all manner of a state or locality’s preference around policing, around education, around healthcare, because all of those things are inexplicably joined with immigration in a nation where 15% of the population is immigrant.

I think it’s really important. I want people to be aware of where we’re trying to tease that out and say, “but this isn’t about immigration” and recognize that the weaponization of immigration is what this administration is able to use across a wide variety of issues that we might think, at first blush, don’t have anything to do with immigration.

Rich Ford: Any other areas where the states have been either rebalancing or setting different priorities in the Trump administration that you’d like to touch on?

Jennifer Chacón: I think we’ve seen it in education policy. For a long time, Texas, among other states had in-state tuition policies for a long-time residents of their state, including undocumented residents who graduated from their high schools.

That’s an example of a policy that cuts the other way. We’re also seeing it in places like Minneapolis where state officials are interested in investigating crimes committed by immigration officers when the federal government doesn’t have any interest in doing that. So that has come up with regard to the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, when the federal government indicated, particularly in the killing Renee Good, that it had no intention of and was discouraging criminal investigations. We saw that it’s a space where perhaps state investigators and state prosecutors can take up that work if the federal government is resistant. There are obstacles to that work, and there are heavy constraints upon states and localities, but it does provide another space for states and localities to rebalance when constitutional and legal violations go unaddressed by the federal.

Rich Ford: And it sounds as if this rebalancing that you’re describing is really a consequence of what you just mentioned earlier: that immigration, the questions of immigration, aren’t easily separable from all of the other issues that states and local governments deal with as a day-to-day basis. So, the rebalancing is in one sense just states and local governance trying to do a good job at what they’ve always been doing in a context in which immigrants, or people who are suspected of being unlawful immigrants, are part of the people they serve.

Jennifer Chacón: Yeah, and I think the second way that I think about it as rebalancing is that I think if you look at the federal immigration laws, you’ll see that they really embed many ideas about immigration, some of which are in tension with one another. Some of our laws are quite generous. You’ve referenced our asylum laws, which seem to be on hiatus for the moment, but exist in the statute and provide a set of rights to asylum seekers. We have certain due process rights that individuals in immigration proceedings are entitled to under these statutes.

So, our immigration laws can be quite harsh and often are. They can be quite unfair and they often are, but they also do have procedural protections in place. They also do have some generous impulses in place. Asylum protections for victims of trafficking, protections for children. So it seems like some of what has happened here is that the federal government is taking the harshest aspects of federal immigration law and running with them while disregarding the many places in immigration law that provide rights, that recognize individual’s humanity and that effectuate international legal protections. And so some of what states are doing in this space is restoring or putting some energy or muscle behind those elements of federal immigration law that have been largely left behind by an administration that is overwhelmingly focused on the enforcement piece.

Rich Ford: Thank you so much for being on Stanford Legal. I know these issues are going to continue to be at the top of the news cycle and in the front of everyone’s mind, and thanks for giving us your insights today.

Jennifer Chacón: Thank you.

Rich Ford: Thanks to our guest, Jennifer Chacón. This is Stanford Legal. If you’re enjoying the show, please tell a friend and leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback improves the show and helps new listeners discover us. I’m Rich Ford. See you next time.