On Saturday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Trust Act. It prohibits illegal aliens from being turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities for possible deportation unless they have been charged with or convicted of a serious offense. ”While Washington waffles on immigration, California’s forging ahead,” Brown said. ”I’m not waiting.”
California is indeed forging ahead. Last Thursday, Brown signed a bill allowing illegal aliens to obtain drivers’ licenses. ”Millions of immigrant families have been looking forward to this day,” said Democratic Assemblyman Luis Alejo, who sponsored the bill. “It will allow them to go to work, go to school, take their kids to a doctor’s appointment without fear that they are going to have their car taken away from them, or worse, be put into immigration proceedings.”
Not “immigrant families.” Illegal immigrant families.
Brown was even busier on Saturday. In addition to the Trust Act, he signed another seven bills aimed at blurring, if not eradicating the distinction between law-abiding legal immigrants and their illegal counterparts. The measures included imposing restrictions on those who charge fees to help illegals gain legal status–and the ability to criminally charge employers who threaten to report an individual’s immigration status, if that threat is used to “induce fear.” Given that it is against the law to hire illegals, Brown and his fellow Democrats have essentially given illegals the power to threaten their employers.
Even more remarkably, Brown also signed a bill that permits the California Supreme Court to grant law licenses to illegal aliens.
Illegal-alien rights activists were ecstatic. “Today marks the dawn of a new era in California’s immigrant communities,” said Reshma Shamasunder, director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. Her organization declared 2013 the “year of the immigrant” in California.
Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) who sponsored the Trust Act, rationalized its passage in a September press release. “Federal officials have held people whose worst alleged violation was selling tamales without a permit or having a barking dog,” he explained. “Even crime victims have been deported. We need to end that to bring back trust between our communities and the local law enforcement agencies supposed to protect them.”
That press release was a window into the mindset of the activist American left, for whom the rule of law its little more than an inconvenient impediment that can be ignored in pursuit of “nobler” ambitions. It further noted that the Trust Act was crafted to defy a federal immigration program known as Secure Communities, or S-Comm. The release bemoaned the fact that more the 50,000 “contributing Californians” had been deported “though they had not been convicted of any crime, or only minor crimes.” In other words, being in the country illegally is completely irrelevant.
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