As President Donald Trump steps up immigration enforcement, half of Californians are worried that someone they know will be deported, a poll released Wednesday found.
The poll, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that 51 percent of Californians and 78 percent of Latinos in California worry about deportation.
Thirty percent of respondents to the poll said they worry “a lot” and 21 percent said they worry “some” about someone they know getting deported. While the percentages are highest among Latinos and foreign-born Californians, substantial numbers of non-Hispanic white people and those born in the U.S also fear people they know getting deported.
“It reflects the fact that immigrants are such a big part of life in California,” said Mark Baldassare, the president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute. “There’s widespread concern about deportation, and not just among Latinos.”
Vanessa Moses, the executive director of Causa Justa, a Bay Area immigrant rights group, said she wasn’t surprised that the number was so high.
“Given the presence and contributions that immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — make in the state of California, the policies coming from the Trump administration are harmful to ultimately all of us,” Moses said. She said the poll should encourage state legislators to pass legislation making California a “sanctuary state,” prohibiting local law enforcement from working with federal immigration officials.
Even those who didn’t have undocumented immigrants in their family said they worried about acquaintances who might not have papers. Thais Jones, 60, a clerk who lives in Oakland and who responded to the survey, said she kept reading about people around the country who were deported even after living in the U.S. for years.
“It could be people that I work with, that are my neighbors, that I see at church and the grocery store,” Jones said in an interview. “I worry that those people could be separated from their family.”
Stephanie, an Oakland social worker who responded to the poll but asked not to use her last name because she’s a government employee, said fear of immigration enforcement had changed the atmosphere at the community college where she worked.
“Some of the students are scared to show up; they’re afraid that ICE is going to raid the school,” she said. “It definitely has a chilling effect.”
The poll also found Trump at his lowest approval rating among Californians since he took office, with just 27 percent approval among adults. That’s down from 30 percent and 31 percent in post-inauguration January and March surveys conducted by the same group.
In follow-up interviews with the Bay Area News Group, poll respondents didn’t hold back on their views about Trump.
“I think he’s completely unqualified for the job, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that the approval rating is that low,” said Beth Woerner, 55, a Democrat who lives in Martinez. “He has a complete inability to look beyond himself and I don’t believe he has the nation’s interest at heart.”
Trump’s approval numbers aren’t the lowest for a president among Californians — for example, an October 2008 PPIC poll as the economy plunged found that just 19 percent of state residents approved of President George W. Bush.
But Baldassare said he had never seen such low ratings so early in a president’s tenure. “Late in the presidency, people have developed disappointment over a longer period of time,” he said. “To start out with such low approval ratings, that’s the part that’s unusual.”
At least Trump is doing better than Congress, which has a 26 percent approval rating — a 10-point drop since March. But both Trump and Congress are falling far below state elected officials: 52 percent of respondents said they approved of Gov. Jerry Brown’s job performance, while the state Legislature came out with a 46 percent approval rating.
When it comes to the hot topic of Russia, 58 percent of respondents said they thought the Russian government tried to influence the results of the 2016 election, and 47 percent said they thought Trump’s campaign intentionally helped. A whopping 70 percent of state Democrats said they believed the Trump campaign had purposefully aided the Russian effort, compared to just 12 percent of Republicans.
Californians disapproved of more specific Trump administration policies. In foreign policy, just 28 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Trump’s ability to handle North Korea’s nuclear program, and only 21 percent said they thought Trump had a clear plan for dealing with the civil war in Syria.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has suggested that he may crack down on marijuana sales in states like California that have legalized the drug. Only 38 percent of Californians said they thought the federal government should enforce marijuana laws in states like California, while 60 percent said the feds should take a hands-off policy.
Meanwhile, opinions were split on whether respondents supported retail sales of marijuana in their own communities, with 48 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed.
The poll has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.2 percentage points and was conducted of 1,707 California adult residents in English and Spanish between May 12 and 22. About two-thirds of the group were interviewed on cellphones and one-third on landlines.
via NAIJA Society
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