New LA police chief’s resistance to Trump deportation plans has little to do with liberal politics

Ballots in Los Angeles were still being counted last week when the resistance to President-elect Donald Trump began to take shape. By Friday, the city’s incoming police chief, Jim McDonnell, was promising the Los Angeles Police Department would refuse support for Trump’s much-ballyhooed deportation schemes.

“The national election has caused many Angelenos to feel a deep, deep fear,” McDonnell said in a statement to the city council, which was debating — and ultimately approved — his nomination. 

“I want to be unequivocal,” he added. “LAPD will protect LA’s immigrant community. We will not cooperate with mass deportations.” 

McDonnell’s statement responded in part to a lurking concern about his record: During his time as Los Angeles County sheriff, that department, which operates the jails, cooperated with federal immigration authorities who would deport people after they were arrested. Although the number of prisoners turned over to the feds fell during McDonnell’s time in that office, some immigrant advocates equated his participation with support. That concern was only ratcheted up by Trump’s election and the sudden fear that Washington’s long arm was about to reach into this city’s longstanding embrace of immigrants.

Mayor Karen Bass, who chose McDonnell for the job, wasted no time in asserting her authority over this closely watched matter of police policy.

“My message is simple,” she said. “No matter where you were born, how you came to this country, Los Angeles will stand with you, and this will not change.”

Those policy pronouncements place Los Angeles squarely at odds with the Trump campaign’s immigration rhetoric, with its shrill insistence that it will launch “mass deportations” on the false theory that illegal immigrants are causing a spike in crime. (In fact, illegal immigrants offend much, much less frequently than people born here) Trump has been spouting versions of that fabricated argument since he launched his first campaign in 2016, and he shows no signs of letting up. 

One of his first announcements as president-elect was to name Tom Homan as his new “border czar.” Homan promptly endorsed Trump’s deportation plans and, in language aimed squarely at local officials, warned cities and states to “get the hell out of the way.”

That’s just bombast, because what may be most striking about Los Angeles’ defiance is that it is not the product of an emerging liberal agenda. In fact, the effort to keep LAPD out of the business of enforcing immigration law is neither new nor liberal. It has its roots deep in LAPD’s history, dating from a time when a very conservative chief headed the department, and President Jimmy Carter was in the White House. 

And in a city that has fought over every aspect of its policing, it is one that leaders of all types have come to embrace.

Special Order No. 40

In the fall of 1979, LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates, who was later known for launching gang sweeps and using a battering ram to knock down crack houses among his many “achievements,” issued a standing order to the police officers under his command. The directive, known as Special Order No. 40, specifically commanded that “officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person.” It also barred officers from arresting or booking anyone for a federal immigration code violation. 

That did not, as some critics suggest, establish Los Angeles as a “sanctuary city.” People in the country illegally, including those living in Los Angeles, could be and were arrested and deported. But the LAPD recognized that it could not protect and serve the whole of Los Angeles if it was seen as the agent of immigration enforcement.

As Gates and other city leaders understood, allowing the LAPD to play that role would undermine trust. Witnesses would be afraid to come forward to report crimes or testify against criminals. Criminals would then go free. Victims in immigrant communities would suffer, and so would those outside those communities, as crimes went unsolved and innocent people were victimized.

There is a principle at work in all of this that is worth noting, even if it won’t affect the policies or programs of an utterly unprincipled president driven chiefly, or perhaps solely, by personal aggrandizement. 

It derives from Catholic teaching and was influential in the thinking of Gov. Jerry Brown, who studied for the priesthood as a young man. It’s called “subsidiarity,” and it argues that responsibility for addressing social problems generally should flow to the most local organization or unit — that the parish understands its needs better than the diocese. 

Or, in this case, that a city understands its residents better than Washington. 

“I want to be unequivocal. LAPD will protect LA’s immigrant community. We will not cooperate with mass deportations.” 

Jim McDonnell, Los angeles police department chief

It’s not an argument for localizing everything. Basic human rights transcend locality, which is why we don’t permit slavery in some areas and not others, for example. But it recognizes the life of communities and their distinctive qualities. It appreciates that experience is personal, not abstract. 

Indeed, that same principle is at work in federalism, an idea that was appealing to conservatives when some states were more conservative than the federal government, but whose appeal passed as soon as conservatives seized power in Washington. 

It’s worth considering here. Los Angeles prioritizes public safety, and the city has long realized that safety is enhanced by treating people who live here as equally entitled to the protection of the law — regardless of how they got here. That’s a time-tested value in LA, whose adherents stretch from Daryl Gates to Karen Bass. 

Los Angeles does not need Donald Trump or Tom Homan to tell it how best to protect its residents.

If resistance to Washington is going to be effective over the next four years, that’s the form it needs to take — not pouting or performative displays of anger but retrenchment to values and the stalwart defense of them in the face of broad and ill-considered acts of vengeance or retribution.

Los Angeles has a right to safety, and it has gone through a long, thoughtful struggle to achieve it. It has no obligation to let anyone, even a president, deflect it from that course.