Could Trump deport undocumented immigrants in SLO County? ‘It’s not safe’
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How will a second Trump term impact SLO County?
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Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of stories in the lead-up to and following President Donald Trump’s inauguration aimed at exploring how a second Trump administration could impact SLO County, with coverage spanning key policy areas such as immigration, tariffs, education and more.
R. Garcia came to America for a better life. Now, she is scared to leave her home.
Garcia, 33, is an undocumented resident of San Luis Obispo County who spoke to The Tribune on the condition of anonymity.
Three years ago, she left behind her family and home in Guerrero, Mexico, and came to Paso Robles. She has lived there ever since, working in hotels and restaurants and sending money home to support her family in Mexico.
But with the incoming Trump administration pushing its anti-immigration agenda and Border Patrol raids already happening in parts of California, she feels more trapped than ever.
“I can’t leave like I used to before,” Garcia said in Spanish as a representative from local nonprofit UndocuSupport translated. “It’s not safe.”
President Donald Trump was tough on immigration during his first term. In his second, he has promised to be ruthless.
His top two campaign promises were to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion” and to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Since being elected, Trump’s plan to crack down on immigration has come into focus. He has promised to end birthright citizenship, has suggested deporting mixed-status families and discussed withholding federal funding from Democratic-controlled sanctuary cities if they refuse to participate in his deportation plan.
During his inaugural address Monday, Trump said he would declare a state of “national emergency at our southern border,” and send troops there “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”
“All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” he said.
He also vowed to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy that he put in place during his first term and end catch-and-release, the practice of detaining and then releasing migrants with the promise of a future court date.
Sure enough, Trump signed multiple executive orders to that effect hours later.
Even before he took office, local immigrant communities were already feeling the impact of these promised policy overhauls.
“We’re already talking to community members who have told us that they’re feeling that chilling effect, without using those words, telling us, ‘We’re afraid of sending our kids to school,’” Rita Casaverde, the executive director of Diversity Coalition SLO County told The Tribune.
However, it is unclear how many of these promises the president could actually follow through on.
A second Trump presidency “could mean a number of things” for SLO County immigrants, Congressman Salud Carbajal told The Tribune — including an increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and raids — but at the end of the day, Trump is limited by the law and the resources available to him.
Regardless, Garcia feels the weight of Trump’s rhetoric and fears deportation at every turn. She leaves her house as little as possible now.
“I won’t be able to be free,” Garcia said.
Who would be impacted by mass deportations?
Garcia’s story echoes thousands of others’ across San Luis Obispo County.
According to a new study conducted by Joel Diringer, a local health and immigration consultant, some 26,000 immigrants call SLO County home — and an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 of them are undocumented.
The report draws mainly from U.S. Census data, though the census does not track data on undocumented people. Instead, those estimates are based on other sources like the USC Immigrant Data portal and the Migration Policy Institute. Diringer said the actual figures are probably “much larger, given that there are undercounts,” but these figures are the “best estimate.”
California is home to 10.6 million immigrants, more than a fifth of all foreign-born people in the country and more than any other state. San Luis Obispo County has a relatively small immigrant population compared to the state average — 10% to California’s 28% — but it is still a significant portion of the local community.
Immigrants are also a huge part of SLO County’s workforce. According to the study, agriculture, construction, hospitality and food service sectors rely heavily on immigrant labor, especially agriculture.
The agriculture industry in SLO County contributes over $2.5 billion to the local economy, according to Diringer’s report. Of the estimated 12,500 farmworkers in the county, half of them are undocumented immigrants, the report said.
If Trump does carry out mass deportations, “our local economy is going to implode,” Carbajal said. “If you think that our grocery prices are expensive right now, when the supply chain for our food and products that come from agriculture doubles and triples, the American people are not going to like that.”
What could deportations look like under Trump?
Despite his political posture, many have cast doubt on Trump’s ability to carry out the mass deportations he promised while campaigning, mainly due to lack of detention space and enforcement personnel.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations’ workforce consists of more than 7,600 law enforcement and non-law enforcement support personnel nationwide. Two other federal agencies, Customs and Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security, also enforce immigration control.
“Even if Trump wanted to use the National Guard, there’s not enough capacity to carry out an operation of that scale, and if it did, it would look like an invasion,” Edwin Carmona-Cruz, the co-executive director of the California Collaborative for Immigration Justice, told The Tribune.
Any undocumented person arrested in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties would be detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Los Angeles, Carmona-Cruz said. At a maximum capacity just shy of 2,000, the facility could be easily overwhelmed.
Even if detainees were transferred to one of the five other facilities in the state, the detention centers still only have a collective capacity to hold up to 7,188 people statewide.
The federal immigration authority is considering plans to build a new California detention center, but this would likely require a major influx of funding to pay for, not to mention the price of detaining and deporting people.
New estimates from an internal ICE document obtained by National Public Radio put the cost of a proposed immigration enforcement bill at $26.9 billion to implement in its first year, saying it “would be impossible for (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to execute within existing resources.”
Even so, the bill only proposes a limited-impact deportation plan targeting those charged with or convicted of theft. Trump’s mass deportation plan of all undocumented people has been estimated at close to $1 trillion over a decade.
Considering these limitations, it is more likely instead that undocumented criminal populations would be deported first, local immigration lawyer Thelmo Fernández Martínez told The Tribune.
Fernández Martínez primarily handles removal proceedings, defending undocumented immigrants who have been detained or served removal orders.
“I have gotten more calls since the election for several reasons, Fernández Martínez said. “I would say No. 1 (is) fear for the future. People are afraid of what this administration could do to them and their families.”
He said that people with outstanding removal orders will be the most susceptible to deportation.
“People who have attended, or even those who have lost their court date in immigration court, or who have received order of removals will definitely be on top of the priorities for removal,” Fernández Martínez said.
After that would be undocumented immigrants with a criminal record. Even just an arrest could lead to being removed from the country, Fernández Martínez said.
Customs and Border Patrol raids on these communities already struck Kern County earlier this month, resulting in 78 arrests, and more operations are planned for Fresno and Sacramento. Border Patrol said the three-day operation in Kern County targeted undocumented immigrants on a list of people with criminal histories, but one agent told the Sacramento Bee there were also arrests of people not on the list.
As for ICE, the agency “targets and arrests noncitizens who commit crimes and other individuals who have violated our nation’s immigration laws,” an ICE spoksperson told The Tribune in a written statement. “All noncitizens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality.”
Some people may also be forced to go through removal proceedings in detention, which makes their legal case more difficult to fight, Fernández Martínez said.
“(It) is a huge disadvantage because of the lack of resources while in detention,” Fernández Martínez said. “It is pretty difficult to defend a case ... to prepare a defense, prepare applications or even prepare the clients when they are held in detention.”
People could even be sent back to Mexico during their proceedings, Fernández Martínez said. He expects a full return to the Migrant Protection Protocol Program, created under the first Trump administration in January 2019. Under the program — commonly referred to as “Remain in Mexico” — undocumented immigrants would be removed to Mexico to wait outside of the country during their residency proceedings. Trump vowed to reinstate the program during his inaugural address Monday.
“I anticipate that if that’s implemented, that may be forcing people to remain in Mexico for years under inhuman conditions and extreme danger,” Martínez said.
Local law enforcement ‘not allowed’ to arrest undocumented immigrants
As it stands, state law limits the involvement of local law enforcement in immigration control, further cutting off the resources with which Trump could use to carry out mass deportations in California.
“There’s nothing in the federal statutes … that requires us to assist ICE,” SLO County Sheriff Ian Parkinson told The Tribune. “There are statutes that say we can’t conceal somebody from them. In other words, we can’t hide them from them, but we cannot cooperate with them under the TRUST and TRUTH Act.”
The California TRUST Act, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in 2013, gives local law enforcement officers discretion when detaining people for potential immigration law violations.
Under the TRUST Act, immigrants can only be detained by local law enforcement if they’ve been convicted of serious or violent felonies.
“Local law enforcement hasn’t been able to enforce immigration law for years,” Parkinson said. “We’re not allowed by law and by even policy to detain somebody for immigration alone.”
Hand-in-hand with the TRUST Act, the 2017 TRUTH Act requires law enforcement to notify undocumented immigrants who are in jail when ICE agents ask for their release date and grants inmates the right to remain silent and decline in-custody interviews with immigration control agents.
Passed in the same year, the Values Act similarly erected a barrier between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement by naming California a “sanctuary state” for non-criminal undocumented immigrants and restricted local authorities from sharing information about individuals’ immigration status with federal authorities, unless the person had been convicted of a serious crime.
“With what California has put in place, we cannot assist them on going up and picking up people. (We) could not cooperate with giving them information,” Parkinson said.
However, local law enforcement could get caught between a rock and hard place with contradictory state and federal directives.
According to an internal U.S. Justice Department memo obtained by the New York Times, interim department leadership has ordered attorneys around the country to investigate and prosecute local law enforcement officials who refuse to enforce the Trump administration’s new immigration policies..
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the opposite. During a conversation hosted by UC Berkeley about immigration under Trump, Bonta told journalists his office is prepared to go after any law enforcement agencies that do not follow state laws about not working with immigration enforcement.
Trump is further limited by constitutional law.
The Fourth Amendment bars the government from conducting unreasonable searches, meaning ICE agents cannot go door-to-door looking for undocumented immigrants, and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees naturalized citizenship for all people born on U.S. soil.
But federal laws could be changed.
Trump could sign an executive order to authorize workplace raids, and even up the ante on the amount of force used. He could do the same to override state sanctuary laws like the Values Act that restricts ICE raids in sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, domestic violence shelters and courthouses.
Already on day one, he signed executive orders to reinstate “Remain in Mexico” and end birthright citizenship, though the legality of the latter has already been challenged by 18 states and the ACLU.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive reinstating ICE agents’ ability to arrest undocumented people at so-called sensitive locations.
“The long and short of it is, if federal law was defined … that we must cooperate with them, then federal law takes precedent over state law and (the) TRUST and TRUTH Act(s) could be somewhat moot,” Parkinson said.
With the checks and balances of Congress and the courts, Trump’s other campaign promises could prove more difficult to enact.
State legislatures said deporting legal citizen members of mixed-status families would be illegal, and the Supreme Court already shot down Trump’s first attempt to block funding to sanctuary cities like San Francisco during his first term.
However, experts agree Trump will likely try alternative routes to reduce immigrants rights, such as cutting federal funds for state programs currently open to undocumented residents in California like Medi-Cal and disaster assistance.
The Tribune reached out to Customs and Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security for this story.
The former did not respond and the latter deferred to the White House for “information on changes in the immigration system.”
SLO County farmer worried fears of deportation could impact workers
As a third-generation farmer, Ryan Talley is used to the seasonal struggle to find enough workers to pick peppers, parsley, bok choy and more at Talley Farms.
“It’s really difficult to find people that are qualified and motivated to work because the agriculture industry is tough. It’s hard work,” the vice president of the Arroyo Grande-based business said.
It’s only through the H-2A visa program that he’s been able to employ enough temporary agricultural workers to complete nearly all of the farm’s harvesting each year, Talley said.
The visa program allows migrants, primarily from Mexico, to work for nine- or 10-month stints on the farm. The business must provide housing and an above-minimum wage, according to Talley.
Each year, Talley Farms employs more than 100 workers through the H-2A program.
“It’s an extremely expensive solution to our lack of labor problem,” Talley said. “But that’s the only thing that keeps us going, because there just isn’t enough labor in our area to suit our agricultural needs here.”
Though those H-2A workers are in the country under a legal visa, in the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration, Talley said he was trying to get ahead of rumors that mass deportations could affect workers at Talley Farms.
Talley said he has tried to stop the spread of misinformation by going around to crews in the fields and explaining Trump’s immigration proposals.
“From my understanding ... it’s more selective and targeted to felons,” he said of Trump’s deportation plans.
He did fear that deportation rumors could cause some employees to stop coming in to work.
But Talley said he’s not ready to “yell fire” on mass deportations just yet — as of mid-January, he felt confident that the new president would leave the agriculture sector alone.
Still, he’s keeping his eyes glued on the news to see what Trump has in store regarding immigration and tariffs. The later could also have a significant affect on the specialty crops and “highly perishable commodities” grown at Talley Farms, he said.
“Any sort of hiccup in the supply chain is going to have an impact on us,” he said.
How are immigrants reacting to Trump presidency?
Maria Patiño shares Garcia’s anguish about the future.
Patiño, 51, has lived in San Luis Obispo County for 28 years, but has been a documented citizen for only two.
When she first came to America in the late 1990s, Border Patrol trucks would routinely drive the fields rounding people up, she said. Her husband, then undocumented, worked as a farmhand at the time.
“It was only working, with (fear) and frustration, thinking that immigration (was) going to come and just put him in the van,” Patiño told The Tribune in Spanish while Silvia Santini, a coordinator for Corazon Latino, translated. “It was just working and going back home.”
Now, Patiño said “it’s (happening) all over again.”
Though she has gained her legal citizenship in this country, she is again scared for her undocumented friends, family and community, unsure of what their new reality holds for them. Just like last time, they are only leaving home to get groceries and go to work.
Immigration lawyers, community leaders and government representatives have all been flooded with questions and concern from undocumented residents who want to know what will happen to them, and what they should do to prepare.
Though he believes Trump’s impacts will not be “as widespread as he claimed,” Carbajal doesn’t know exactly what to tell his constituents.
“I can’t tell undocumented individuals in my district, ‘Don’t worry,’ as they should be worried,” Carbajal said. “He can, and will, do damage. He is creating anxiety. He is creating anguish. And that is something that, regrettably, is going to be happening.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2025 at 1:29 PM.
