Before the shooting, liberal-leaning states and cities had been moving to take the reins of immigration reform, legal experts say, even as such efforts stalled in a rancorously divided Congress.
From expanded access to driver’s licenses, new forms of municipal IDs, as well as expanded access to education and health services, many liberal states and local jurisdictions were working to integrate more of the nation’s 11.7 million undocumented workers into the fabric of American life with a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to public services.
“I think the weight of the momentum over the past few years has really been in favor of these policies of inclusion,” says Melissa Keaney, staff attorney in the Los Angeles office of the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for low-income immigrants in the US. “States are filling in the gaps where they can to make do while awaiting immigration reform.”
And for the past two years, many states, including California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, as well as hundreds of counties and cities, passed laws to bolster decades-old “sanctuary” policies, which generally prohibit municipal employees from helping the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) identify and possibly deport people without immigration papers.
These new “TRUST acts” take sanctuary policies one step further by requiring law enforcement officials not to honor “detainer” requests for undocumented immigrants being held in local jails unless there is a federal warrant or the individual has been convicted of a serious crime.
But the case of Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is promising to bring this momentum of progressive immigration reform, at the local level, to a dramatic halt.