Programming Note: We’ll be off this Monday for Presidents Day but will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday. THE BUZZ: AVOIDING COURTROOMS — California Democrats tried to turn their state into a safe haven for undocumented immigrants during Donald Trump’s first term. But since returning to office, the president hasn’t challenged the Golden State’s immigrant legal protections to clear the way for mass deportations. It can’t have hurt that California hasn’t gone as far as New York or Illinois on key laws that have landed the other big, blue states in court. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued New York this week over its law that provides driver’s licenses to undocumented residents, and she singled out a provision that Califiornia’s own driver’s licence law doesn’t include. New York alerts undocumented people when their DMV data is accessed by the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s tipping off an illegal alien, and it’s unconstitutional, and that’s why we filed this lawsuit,” Bondi said when announcing the legal action. California began giving “AB 60 licenses” to undocumented residents in 2015, named for the law that created the IDs. Its motor vehicles department shares with DHS the names, addresses and other information about people who hold California licenses, though it doesn’t alert license holders about it or disclose whether they’re undocumented. Illinois, meanwhile, faces a separate suit from the Trump administration over its laws limiting state and local law enforcement’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. California passed SB 54 in 2017, which does that, too. Yet Illinois’ laws go beyond California’s curbs on state and local police sharing information with the feds, which include exemptions for several serious crimes and survived a legal challenge from Trump during his first term. Illinois strengthened its “sanctuary” law in 2021 to explicitly ban state and local police from partnering with the federal government on immigration enforcement issues, and prohibited state and local governments from signing contracts with private immigration prisons. California also allows for more info sharing with DHS, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit outfit focused on immigrant rights, which ranked Illinois’ immigrant protections as among the strongest in the nation — ahead of California’s. A common denominator behind California’s driver’s license and the statewide “sanctuary” law is former Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed both. More moderate than many Democratic legislators at the time, he limited the impact of SB 54 through carefully detailed negotiations, leading to a carveout that allows ICE to get information from state prisons. SB 54 also allows local law enforcement to work with ICE to deport undocumented immigrants who are already in jail for committing serious crimes or are expected to be charged with violent felonies. “The state of California, even though we are pro-immigrant, you have to strike a common sense balance, and and I think your average Californian wants to make sure that our laws will hold the most serious offenders accountable,” said former Democratic Assemblymember Luis Alejo, who was in the state Legislature when it passed the law. Alejo also authored the driver’s license law, and said he didn’t even bother sending it to Brown until he made sure licenses for undocumented people would be marked as such — a controversial change that frustrated immigration advocates. “I told them the governor won’t sign it,” if the licenses were identical to IDs for citizens, said Alejo, now a Monterey County supervisor. Other important factors may have saved California’s laws so far. SB 54 already survived a court challenge from Trump’s first administration, and the Supreme Court declined to overturn a favorable ruling for the state — potentially imperiling the chances of another suit succeeding. And Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has tempered his rhetoric toward the president while seeking federal aid to help Los Angeles recover from the recent fires, is not eager to upend SB 54. He believes it strikes the right balance and vowed to veto legislation that would prevent prisons’ cooperation with ICE, as POLITICO first reported Thursday. The proposal was shelved within hours. Newsom’s approach stands in contrast to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Trump provocateur of late, particularly around immigration issues: “You come for my people, you come through me,” he recently said. California and its most prominent mayors also were not as squarely targeted by Republican operations busing migrants to their states, which spurred political upheaval in New York City and Chicago. Trump has promised millions of deportations, and to achieve that, he’d likely have to expel more people from California, which could mean targeting other legal protections that apply to people with, or without, criminal records. “The three weeks of this administration have been a mad scramble, and I wouldn't call what's coming out of the administration … logical or flowing in a logical order,” Latino Community Foundation CEO Julián Castro, a Democrat who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, told Playbook. “Who knows what their big thought process is?” GOOD MORNING. Happy Friday. Thanks for waking up with Playbook. You can text us at 916-562-0685 — save it as “CA Playbook” in your contacts. Or drop us a line at dgardiner@politico.com and bjones@politico.com, or on X — @DustinGardiner and @jonesblakej. WHERE’S GAVIN? Nothing official announced.
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