Dean Johnson Comments for Media on Trump Administration and Immigration

Dean Kevin R. Johnson commented for media including the San Francisco Chronicle and PolitiFact California on the potential impact of president-elect Donald Trump’s immigration policies in California, which is home to around 2.3 million undocumented immigrants.

Trump appears to be set to follow President Obama’s lead in concentrating immigration enforcement on criminal offenders, but where Obama focused on deporting those who have committed serious offenses, “the Trump administration may go back and focus on all criminal offenders,” Johnson told PolitiFact California.

Some immigrants who participated in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program fear the fact that the government already has all their personal information may make them early targets of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, the Chronicle reports.  Dean Johnson said he thought that was unlikely.

“I think it would be an unprecedented moment in U.S. immigration history to use this kind of voluntarily given information solicited in good faith for a relief program and turn it around to try to engage in mass deportations,” he said. Dean Johnson also said that any attempt to use the information against the applicants would be met with a robust legal objection.

Kevin R. Johnson is Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o studies at UC Davis School of Law. He is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of immigration law and policy, refugee law, and civil rights.