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WASHINGTON — Democratic governors around the country are vowing to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. But most aren’t prepared for what could be coming, legal experts who envision brutal crackdowns say, and the vast majority of Democrat-led states lack meaningful safeguards to prevent the transfer of undocumented people to federal immigration enforcement authorities. Trump is moving quickly to set up a team to carry out mass deportations.
He’s named his “border czar,” Tom Homan, who led Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term in office. Homan is promising a “historic deportation operation” and already telling critics to “get the hell out of the way. ” Stephen Miller, the white nationalist architect of many of Trump’s first-term immigration policies, will also have a hand in the rollout as a top White House official.
The mass deportation plans, which could harm the U.S. economy, restart inflation, separate parents from their children and even result in the deportation of American citizens, are clearly among Trump’s top priorities, even if their scale and targets remain hazy at best.
Democratic governors are lining up to say they’ll defy any orders to participate in this, suggesting they’ll seriously complicate Trump’s efforts to deport as many as 11 million people who are in the country without permanent legal status. “Absolutely not,” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said last week on MSNBC , when asked if her state’s police would cooperate with the Trump administration’s planned deportations.
“The key here is that every tool in the toolbox is going to be used to protect our citizens, to protect our residents and protect our states, and certainly to hold the line on democracy and the rule of law as a basic principle,” Healey said. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he’s “willing to try anything” to stop Trump’s sweeping plans, including mass deportations, that are “contrary to our values.
” “If it’s contrary to our values, we’ll fight to the death,” Murphy told reporters last week. “If there is an opportunity for common ground, we’ll seize that as fast as anybody.” Illinois Gov.
JB Pritzker was just as forceful: “You come for my people, you come through me,” he told reporters last week, referring to minority communities in his state who experienced the “chaos, retribution and disarray” of Trump in his first term in office. This is some tough talk. But what can Democratic governors actually do to stop a massive federal deportation operation — one that Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under the Biden administration, said he expects to play out like a “shock and awe” campaign? The short answer is, it depends on each state and its unique set of laws.
And the reality is that many states, even those led by Democrats, are not ready. In a Thursday call with reporters, immigration experts laid out how they expect Trump’s deportation operation to work: ICE could conduct militarized worksite raids, targeting vulnerable populations in particular (e.g.
immigrants at remote work sites far from access to legal representation, like meat-packing factories). Local law enforcement could racially profile people in their own communities, casting all immigrants as criminals. And officers could intentionally make a show of the brutality of their efforts to inspire fear among immigrants so they’ll self-deport.
“Let’s not sugarcoat the dragnet, the indiscriminate nature of what’s about to happen,” said Naureen Shah, deputy director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union. She cautioned people not to let Trump’s rhetoric of primarily deporting criminals to ”skew our understanding of who now has to live in fear that they will be picked up, just because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — and what that means for millions of people and millions of mixed-status households in the country, who have to worry that their husband or their father is not going to come home whenever they leave the house.” Houser, who worked at ICE from 2021 to 2023 and was previously a high-ranking official at the Department of Homeland Security, said he expects the White House to push ICE to be as punitive as possible.
“They will militarize the execution of arrests to strike the most fear in migrant communities,” he said, adding, “The goal is to show the brutality.” Democratic governors have a few options to push back on this in their states. They could, for example, issue an executive order directing state personnel not to voluntarily provide any information that could be used for federal immigration enforcement.
The problem, though, is that ICE could reach out directly to sheriffs and ask for information on a particular undocumented immigrant or for help in setting up a traffic perimeter to check people’s driver licenses, and the sheriff could decide to cooperate. In some Democrat-led states, sheriffs may not realize they’re not allowed to do this. “What we want to make sure is that state governments and city governments, where it’s possible, are providing training and legal advice and support to their frontline employees who are going to be receiving this request,” said Shah.
“There is quite a lot of latitude there when you’re talking about — are you going to voluntarily push your assets and your information, access to your databases, access to your jails, all of that, to ICE and to other federal agencies?” Lots of cities in Democrat-led states are so-called “sanctuary cities,” which provide some legal protections to undocumented immigrants. But these policies are not as protective as they’d need to be to block a mass deportation operation. Specifically, they don’t meaningfully limit cooperation between state and local authorities and the federal government.
The governors in the strongest position to counter Trump’s mass deportations are those with state laws explicitly barring local and state law enforcement from coordinating with the federal government to identify, detain and deport undocumented immigrants. Of the country’s 23 states led by Democratic governors, just two — Oregon and Illinois — have comprehensive state laws that do this. In these two states, and only in these states, it is illegal for law enforcement to help ICE with deportations at all.
A few other Democrat-led states have strong immigrant protections on the books, even if they could be stronger. California, New Jersey and Washington fall into this category. California, for example, a state with 1.
8 million undocumented immigrants , has Senate Bill 54, passed in 2017. It bars local and state law enforcement from using their resources for federal immigration enforcement. The policy makes an exception for violent offenders, but beyond that, any law enforcement agencies that assist ICE with deportations would be breaking state law.
“The federal government certainly has its own authority and can act within it, but they often — almost always — heavily rely on local and state cooperation, which need not be given,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told HuffPost. Bonta noted that California’s law has already been upheld in federal court , in 2018, when the Trump administration tried to halt it. He expects Democratic governors and state attorneys general to be monitoring the coming Trump administration to see if it tries to break laws.
“They did it all the time,” Bonta said of Trump’s first administration, citing Trump’s failed effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program , or DACA, which protects eligible young adults who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
He also cited Trump’s failed effort to expand the public-charge rule , which would have denied permanent resident status to immigrants who receive public benefits like food assistance or Medicaid. “They tried to attack our SB 54,” he added. “We won every time.
” But California, even with its relatively strong protections, may “still affirmatively transfer many immigrants directly from state and local officials to immigration detention,” according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center . The only other sanctuary states are Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland and Vermont, though their protections are weaker. This is why immigration rights and civil rights advocates are sounding the alarm for Democratic governors to get moving — now — by signing executive orders or pushing through new laws to protect immigrants in their states.
In New York, for example, which is home to roughly 835,000 undocumented immigrants , there is no state law preventing law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. The New York-based Immigrant Defense Project is urging legislators to pass a bill that would do just that, the New York for All Act, immediately when the state legislature convenes in January. The group is also pressuring New York Gov.
Kathy Hochul to publicly support the bill, especially after she declared after last week’s election results that she is “committing to safeguarding the rights, freedoms and values we hold dear — no matter what lies ahead.” Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether she would cooperate with the Trump administration if it asked for help with deportations. For the moment, New York offers undocumented immigrants a disjointed mix of local ordinances that offer protections in some places and no safeguards in others.
“I live in Queens,” said Yasmine Farhang, director of advocacy for the Immigrant Defense Project. “I can tell a neighbor that they can feel safe interacting with a local agency in our neighborhood ..
. and then they can drive 15 minutes east into Nassau County, and I can’t tell them that.” Not surprisingly, New York City does have local laws in place to protect immigrants.
An estimated 476,000 undocumented immigrants live in the city. Democratic Mayor Eric Adams has vowed to keep them safe, even as he’s been critical of the influx of migrants, claiming the surge “will destroy New York City.” “In keeping with those laws, we will not be providing any information about the undocumented to the federal government,” said an Adams spokesperson.
“But we are willing to sit down with anyone who is serious about actually fixing our broken immigration system and coming up with a real solution that tackles the border crisis.” Homan has signaled he’s got his eye on New York City, and suggested he’s prepared to flood the city with ICE agents if local officials don’t help him identify and detain undocumented people. “If we can’t get assistance from New York City, we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City, because we’re going to do the job,” he vowed Friday .
“If sanctuary cities don’t want to help us, then get the hell out of the way, because we’re coming.” Homan does have the authority to send more ICE agents into the city. They just won’t get much help from anyone once they get there.
And if state legislators pass the New York for All Act, local and state law enforcement officials would be breaking the law if they helped ICE. “There’s nothing that local and state governments can do to keep ICE out of our states,” said Farhang. “But what we can do is make their jobs a hell of a lot harder and mitigate the harm.
” Other states in the country have no laws shielding migrants from ICE. Some — particularly strongly Republican states like Texas and Florida — have laws explicitly requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE in transferring undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration will likely rely heavily on sheriffs and local police for carrying out mass deportations, predicted Jessica Pishko, an attorney specializing in criminal law and the author of “The Highest Law in the Land,” which examines the power of the nation’s sheriffs.
County sheriffs in particular will play a key role in whether Trump can ramp up deportations because, simply put, they run the jails, said Pishko. It is “very probable” ICE will look to sheriffs, she said, given that most undocumented immigrants being deported right now are coming straight out of county jails after being arrested for things like driving without a driver’s license, where they are flagged to ICE as being undocumented. “It’s easy because if someone is getting released from jail, ICE can just pull the van up and pick them up,” she said.
“That’s the bulk of immigration enforcement that’s being done on the local level. You can get deported before you’re tried.” Pishko went further to suggest that sheriffs, by virtue of being elected and accountable only to their immediate communities, may operate independently from what state officials direct them to do.
She offered an alarming, if extreme, scenario of how the next four years could play out: The vast majority of the nation’s more than 3,000 sheriffs go along with Trump’s mass deportation plans, restrictive state laws be damned, because by area, the vast majority of counties voted for Trump — and the vast majority of sheriffs are conservative white men who support Trump, too. “The problem is how many counties voted for Trump. Probably more than 80%,” Pishko said.
“So in all those counties, sheriffs are in counties where people voted for Trump, and it’s pretty likely they will cooperate with ICE.” Bonta scoffed at the idea of Trump-aligned sheriffs doing this anywhere in California. “That is 1000% illegal,” said the state attorney general.
“There’s nothing magic about being independently elected. They all have to follow the law.” “Nobody has won any cases showing that the sheriffs actually have that power.
” Pritzker, the Illinois governor, similarly rejected the idea that sheriffs in his state have the power to ignore sanctuary laws and assist ICE anyway. His state’s law, the gold-standard Trust Act, restricts local and state law enforcement’s engagement with federal immigration enforcement. It specifically bars local and state law enforcement from stopping, arresting or detaining someone solely due to their immigration status.
“You talk about mass deportation as if we’re going to — or the federal government is going to — round up, as has been threatened, just anybody who can’t prove their citizenship,” Pritzker told HuffPost on a Tuesday call with reporters. “That wouldn’t be the case, and sheriffs do not have that power independently.” With a laugh, the Illinois governor said there is “one particular sheriff’s organization” that likes to falsely claim sheriffs are independent of all other legal authorities.
It’s not clear which group he meant, but so-called constitutional sheriffs have often tried to make that claim. “Nobody has won any cases showing that the sheriffs actually have that power,” he added. “Nevertheless, they like to meet with one another and convince each other that they do.
” Some Democratic governors are already taking steps to add protections for immigrants in their states before Trump takes office. Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis this week announced they are the co-chairs of a new nonpartisan group, Governors Safeguarding Democracy.
Its aim is to connect governors with think tanks and legal experts to ensure their states are doing everything they can to protect residents’ democratic rights. The group isn’t explicitly focused on countering Trump’s plans for mass deportations, but that purpose is clearly implied. Its stated goal, according to its press release, is to combat “the dangers of authoritarianism and the undermining of democratic institutions.
” Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom last week convened a special session of the state legislature to boost the state’s legal options for protecting immigrant families′ rights and other “California values.” “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack—and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom said in a statement .
“California faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond.” Newsom, Polis and Pritzker are potential 2028 presidential contenders, and their latest actions certainly lend themselves to a future campaign against Trump. But even if politics are in play, that doesn’t mean the residents of these states aren’t legitimately scared by Trump’s plans and looking to Democratic leaders for help.
And even in states with anti-immigrant laws on the books, like Arizona, some local law enforcement officials who otherwise support Trump may not want anything to do with mass deportations. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.
) recently told HuffPost, before the election, that he had just been talking to a conservative border sheriff in Arizona about some of Trump’s plans, including mass deportations. This particular sheriff, who he wouldn’t identify, was not a fan. Don't let this be the end of the free press.
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Whether you give just one more time or sign up again to contribute regularly, we appreciate you playing a part in keeping our journalism free for all. Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages. “He said, ‘It ain’t gonna happen in my community,’” recalled Kelly.
“He is possibly, publicly, a Trump supporter,” he said. “But he also understands he’s got responsibilities and understands the law.” Related From Our Partner.
