ICE is Developing a Political Rainshadow

Via Rantingly, a headline with some interesting implications:

The federal immigration law alphabet soup — ICE, HSI, ERO, CBP — is escalating against escalating resistance, growing an enforcement footprint in the deep blue cities where they meet the clearest opposition. But that choice contains other choices.

The historian and retired professor Victor Davis Hanson is also a farmer, the fifth-generation owner of a raisin farm in the Central Valley of California. A couple decades back, he wrote a book about the transformation of the place where he grew up, under the title Mexifornia. He wasn’t arguing that the Central Valley had become newly Hispanic, a demographic that had always been central to a giant agricultural region in a border state. Rather, he wrote that the transition from legal immigration to widespread illegal immigration was changing the culture and landscape, trashing his lifelong home. The Central Valley has, and has had, a large population of illegal immigrants: according to some estimates, about 330,000, or ten percent of adults.

And yet. When I drive around Los Angeles, I see NO ICE signs in apartment windows and freeway overpasses. When I travel through the small towns of the Central Valley, it seems — you can talk me out of this if you live there — that the subject matter is being handled much more quietly. And then, if you go looking for recent ICE raids in the news there, you get stories like this, from exactly the town where Victor David Hanson runs his family farm and writes about the changes brought about in his neighborhood by widespread illegal immigration:

The stories aren’t about ICE raids — they’re about the fear of ICE raids, about the chance that ICE will at some future point begin to show up in force there. You can find similar stories in agricultural regions outside the Central Valley:

Describing a regional network of anti-ICE activists, this story reports that “rumors of ICE raids at the southern end of Gilroy resulted in the network sending a group of observers out at 5:30 a.m. to wait for hours only for ICE never to be seen.” That seems to be the pattern in agricultural areas far from major cities: people are waiting for ICE to show up, only for ICE to never be seen.

This is not to say that there’s been no ICE activity in the Central Valley, or in other agricultural areas well outside the major cities. But if you go looking for ICE activity in the news in small-town agriculture-centered California, you’ll mostly find months-old stories and stories about an arrest or three. I’m seeing no recent evidence at all of the kind of raids happening in and around Los Angeles, with dozens of federal cops jumping out of rented trucks or riding into MacArthur Park on horseback. Central Valley immigration enforcement has so far happened on a much smaller scale, less frequently, in a place where somewhere around ten percent of the adult population is subject to deportation.

In a 164,000 square-mile state with 482 cities and 58 counties, immigration enforcement with hundreds or even thousands of federal agents is going to be a challenge. If you’re an illegal immigrant working on a ranch outside Alturas, you’re probably not going to be noticed for a long time.

But it seems to me that the implication of that opening headline — ICE ramps up operations in sanctuary cities — is that elected officials in Los Angeles and elsewhere who engage in constant theatrics about fighting against Mean Orange Man to protect our wonderful kind undocumented neighbors are achieving the opposite: they’re pulling federal resources toward their cities. Calm is producing calm, and theatrical opposition is producing theatrical escalation. We’ll see.

I’ve tried for a couple of weeks to get elected officials in small Central Valley towns to discuss the apparent absence of significant raids in their communities with me, and all of my questions have been met with the iciest possible silence. You can see why they wouldn’t be happy to have that discussion. And the ICE press office ignored my questions. But try it yourself: go hunting in the news for significant, recent, and sustained ICE raids in small-town ag-centered California.

It very much looks to me like the clearest way to predict the escalation of ICE raids in a community is to watch how much the local officials there make a spectacle about their opposition to ICE raids. An inherently political process is playing out on along interesting political lines. The loudest sanctuary cities are drawing a target on themselves.