ballot measure 88

At a booth at the recent state fair in Salem, people waited in line at a booth for Oregonians for Immigration Reform to sign the group’s proposed ballot measure to repeal Oregon’s so-called “sanctuary law.”

Cynthia Kendoll, the group’s president, said this new measure is attracting more intense interest than its previous attempts to discourage illegal immigration.

“This is something that people are truly really concerned about,” said Kendoll, “and I have just been amazed here at the state fair that people walk up and say, ‘Just let me sign this. I am so sick of this.’”

Oregon may not seem like it is on the front lines of the battle over immigration policy. But the state appears headed toward a bitter election fight on the issue that could reverberate nationally. 

During his presidential campaign last year, Donald Trump put a harsh spotlight on jurisdictions that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration officials. In recent weeks, he’s wavered on some immigration issues — such as moving to cut a deal with Democrats on protecting immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children. But his administration continues to attack so-called sanctuary laws.

Andrea Williams, one of the chief opponents of the measure, said the looming ballot fight sets up a choice for voters between going with the Trump administration or sticking with law she says reflects “Oregon values” and has long worked well.

“To me, the issue is very simple,” added Williams, executive director of Causa, a Salem-based immigrant rights group.  “Do we want to spend Oregon resources to do the federal government’s job?”

Oregon 30 years ago adopted a law limiting local and state police involvement with federal enforcement. It was the first statewide law of its kind, but it attracted little attention or controversy. Supporters said the law was needed because some local police officers were detaining Latinos simply based on their appearance.

The term sanctuary came into vogue much later as many cities began resisting large-scale deportations. Critics charged that sanctuary cities were shielding criminals and Trump highlighted the issue in his campaign. 

“We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths,” Trump vowed. At the Republican convention last year, the relatives of people who had been killed by immigrants illegally in the country were prominently featured on stage.

Just a few weeks later, Oregonians for Immigration Reform began laying the groundwork for an initiative to abolish the state law.

Trump’s focus “gave us the backup that this is truly something that people are concerned about,” said Kendoll.

Opponents are gearing up to fight the measure and their feelings are also intense.

“Their ultimate goal is to get rid of immigrants because they want white nationalism in this state,” said state Rep. Diego Hernandez, D-Portland.  He argued that Oregon’s sanctuary law helps encourage cooperation with local police.

Causa is helping assemble a broad coalition to oppose the measure. Williams, the group’s executive director, has signed up a sort of who’s who of the major political backers of the Democratic political leadership of the state: the public employee unions, environmental groups as well as gay and abortion rights advocates.

She says her group got a wake-up call three years ago when Oregon voters rejected a new law providing driver’s licenses for people in the country illegally.

The idea was to give people a form of identification that would allow them to drive legally to work and get auto insurance. But Oregonians for Immigration Reform, charging that it only enabled illegal immigration, put the issue on the ballot and won in a landslide.

“We do have to get better at talking to Oregonians about the circumstances — why people here are undocumented and why they have limited solutions to adjust their status,” Williams said. If the sanctuary issue gets on the ballot, she said, her coalition will have to do a lot more to reach out to Oregonians to talk about the lives of immigrants and the economic benefits she said they bring to the state.

Surveys taken in Oregon and in the country as a whole generally show strong support for immigration reform that would provide some sort of path to legal status for people in the country without citizenship. But the sanctuary issue is different.

That became clear in staunchly Democratic California this year. After Trump was elected, the state Senate’s leader, Los Angeles Democrat Kevin de Léon, introduced a statewide sanctuary bill. But instead of winning swift passage and serving as a rebuke to Trump, it languished for months.

It faced strong opposition from many California law enforcement officials and one independent poll in March showed voters strongly divided on the issue. A watered-down version didn’t pass until the final hours of the legislative session on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2017.

It’s still a long time until Oregon’s anti-sanctuary initiative could go before voters in November 2018. But there’s been plenty of early maneuvering around the issue.

Kendoll’s group was the first to take advantage of a new petitioning rule from Secretary of State Dennis Richardson that allows them to collect signatures while waiting for the ballot title to be finalized. Several groups are challenging Richardson’s rule. If they’re successful, it could put a major crimp in the petition drive.

Perhaps more crucially, critics of the measure are accusing Oregonians for Immigration Reform of having ties to white nationalism. They say the group has accepted aid from groups and individuals concerned about the changing racial composition of the country.

Kendoll denied that her group is motivated by racial animus.

“We’re going after people who are here illegally,” she said. “Their race, their ethnicity, their religion — anything — has nothing to do with it. It’s, ‘are you in our country legally?’”

That leads Kendoll to some hard-line views. She said the estimated 11 million people who entered the country illegally should leave, and she supports ending the program allowing those brought here as children to gain legal status. In addition, she backs legislation that would cut legal immigration by half over the next decade.

“When you allow such a large number of people to immigrate legally,” she said, “assimilation is more difficult because they tend to clump together and not assimilate.”

The sanctuary issue provides a hot-button path toward that goal.

At the Oregonians for Immigration Reform booth, volunteers displayed the mugshot of Sergio Martinez and called him their “poster boy.”

He’s the man accused of sexually assaulting a 65-year-old woman after being released from the Multnomah County Jail despite being frequently deported. Focusing on this one extreme example infuriates opponents.

“They play off peoples’ fears. That’s how they win,” said Causa’s Williams. She said this line of attack unfairly stereotypes people who enter the country illegally, especially since research shows they are actually less likely to commit crimes. 

If Oregon’s 30-year-old sanctuary law is repealed, the result would likely be a patchwork of local policies. Counties and cities would be able to decide on their own how or if they wanted to limit their involvement with federal immigration enforcement.

The initiative needs 88,184 signatures by next July to qualify for the ballot. Kendoll isn’t saying how many signatures they’ve collected so far. Read more about Fight Over Oregon's 'Sanctuary Law' Brings Immigration Policy Battle To The NW

As he planned his improbable ascent, a peculiar election result from a small Western state might have caught Donald Trump’s eye. In 2014, Oregonians voted nearly 2-1 against a ballot measure that would have allowed the state to issue driver’s cards to people who could not prove legal residency in the United States. The proposal was a modest public-safety measure, but most voters saw it as an accommodation of illegal aliens and said no — hell no. Trump saddled that same emotional response and rode it into the White House. Now he must deliver.

The president made a start last week. He took executive action to start construction on a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico, a step toward fulfillment of one of his most frequently made, and most loudly echoed, campaign promises. And he moved to cut federal grants to “sanctuary cities,” striking a blow against the same political impulse that Oregon voters rejected in 2014: the impulse that crafts humane and pragmatic policies that are perceived as creating more space in American society for undocumented immigrants.

How these initial steps will be completed is far from clear. The cost and configuration of the wall — in some places, it’s likely to be more like a fence — are not known. Trump insists that Mexico will pay for the wall, an idea firmly rejected by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Various ideas for financing the wall have been advanced, including a 20 percent tax on goods imported to the United States from Mexico. Such a tax would be paid by American consumers, not Mexicans.

Pena Nieto had planned to meet with Trump this week, but the event was canceled after Trump reiterated his demand that Mexico pay for the wall. Trump will need to guard against creating problems that would prove far more costly than a border wall. A tax on exports to the United States would affect 80 percent of Mexico’s trade, damaging the country’s economy. Humiliating Pena Nieto, who is already politically unpopular, could open the door to a disruptive successor. Economic instability, political turmoil or both in Mexico would damage U.S. economic interests, create security concerns and trigger higher rates of illegal immigration.

The crackdown on sanctuary cities is similarly vague. The Trump administration has not defined what a sanctuary city is, but they come in several varieties. There are even sanctuary states, including Oregon. Many state and local governments, or the heads of their police agencies, have said that police will not inquire about the immigration status of people they contact. The aim is to keep the police from taking on the responsibilities of federal immigration officers, and to maintain trust among immigrant populations. Such policies involve setting priorities for public safety, not defiance of federal law.

In other cases, sanctuary cities decline to detain people suspected of being illegal immigrants until federal immigration agents can take custody of them. This is often due to a shortage of jail space or a lack of federal reimbursement for incarceration costs, not a refusal to cooperate in the enforcement of immigration laws.

Few jurisdictions that have labeled themselves sanctuaries are actively working to frustrate the enforcement of immigration laws — they’re just not cooperating to varying degrees. The Trump administration will have to draw the line between defiance and non-cooperation, and some grants can’t be withheld without congressional approval. Too far-reaching a cutoff would face legal action by cities or states on grounds that the U.S. government can’t compel them to spend their money to enforce federal laws.

Trump understood the emotional power of the immigration issue better than his rivals. But delivering on his promises will require coherent, constructive policies. Devising them will prove harder than tapping a vein of anger and resentment.

  Read more about Delivering on immigration

A judge in U.S. District Court in Eugene has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to give illegal immigrants in Oregon access to short-term drivers’ licenses.

The suit, filed on behalf of five unnamed illegal immigrants from Mexico, sought to restore a 2013 law, passed by the Oregon ­Legislature as Senate Bill 833, creating those new licenses. That law was overturned after it was referred to Oregon voters as Measure 88 in November 2014 and soundly defeated.

Oregon’s refusal to issue driver cards is unconstitutional because immigration regulation is done at the federal level and “is not a legitimate state interest,” the illegal immigrants’ lawsuit had argued. The refusal to issue licenses is “arbitrary” and “capricious” and is “motivated, at least in part, by animus towards Mexicans and Central Americans,” it said. The lawsuit named Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and leaders of the state ­Department of Transportation as ­defendants.

But, in a ruling released Monday, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken wrote that she lacked the authority to compel the state to issue drivers’ licenses outright. Moreover, she found, SB 833 never went into effect as an Oregon law. That means that, even if Aiken invalidated the voters’ rejection of Measure 88 as unconstitutional, “no (existing) law authorizes the state to grant driver cards,” Aiken wrote.

“As such, the state defendants are not refusing to issue driver cards because a referendum motivated by discriminatory animus prevents them from doing so; they cannot issue driver cards because no valid, existing Oregon law authorizes them to do so,” Aiken wrote.

Aiken’s ruling supported the argument made by the state attorney general’s office in its motion to dismiss.

Sarah Weston, assistant attorney general, wrote that the state “agrees that enacting a driver card program would have benefited (the plaintiffs) and would have been good policy for the state.”

But “the relief the plaintiffs seek — the enactment and implementation of SB 833 — cannot be imposed on the state by the federal court in this action,” Weston wrote.

“Just as would be the case with any other bill that failed to become law via the legislative process, if plaintiffs seek to have SB 833 enacted, they must try again via that process,” she added.

Representatives of the Oregon Law Center, which filed the suit on behalf of the five immigrants and two Latino-focused nonprofit organizations, could not be reached for comment on Aiken’s ruling Monday.

Oregonians for Immigration Reform, the chief opponents of Measure 88, applauded the decision.

“Today, the court has dismissed the meritless and frivolous case,” the group said in a statement. “Nearly a million voters said ‘no’ — and now the Court is standing with us. No driver cards for those who can’t prove they are legally present in the country.”

For many years, Oregon allowed residents to get a driver’s license regardless of his or her legal status. But starting in 2008, because of the federal REAL ID Act, ­residents have had to prove legal status to get one.

Measure 88 would have created a new type of short-term driver’s license, available to anyone who had lived in Oregon for at least a year.

Twelve states now provide drivers’ licenses regardless of people’s legal status, including Washington state, California and Nevada.

Follow Saul on Twitter @SaulAHubbard . Email saul.hubbard@registerguard.com .
  Read more about Federal judge dismisses lawsuit seeking drivers licenses for illegal immigrants in Oregon

  Read more about Court dismisses lawsuit against Oregon Measure 88!