How a 1995 California court ruling that restored immigrant rights could backfire in 2025

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California has the nation’s largest population of undocumented immigrants with roughly 1.8 million people. Over the last three decades, Californians’ attitudes about that fact have undergone an astonishing swing.

Hostility reached a peak in the early 1990s, demonstrated by passage of Proposition 187 in 1994 by a 3-2 margin. The measure would have required police to check the legal status of people they encountered and barred public services, including education, to those who could not prove citizenship or legal residency.

It was the centerpiece of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s campaign for a second term, contending that undocumented people were overwhelming the state’s budget.

However, support for a crackdown was not confined to GOP voters. Not only did many Democrats — then as now the largest bloc of voters — vote for the measure, but a Legislature dominated by Democrats passed anti-immigrant laws, such banning driver’s licenses.

Soon, however, public sentiment and the political atmosphere began to change. Undocumented immigrants and their advocates scored a big win a year after Prop. 187’s passage when federal Judge Marianna Pfaelzer ruled that the measure violated the federal government’s exclusive power to regulate immigration.

“The California voters’ overwhelming approval of Proposition 187 reflects their justifiable frustration with the federal government’s inability to enforce the immigration laws effectively,” she wrote at the time. “No matter how serious the problem may be, however, the authority to regulate immigration belongs exclusively to the federal government and state agencies are not permitted to assume that authority. The state is powerless to enact its own scheme to regulate immigration or to devise immigration regulations which run parallel to or purport to supplement the federal immigration laws.”

A few years later, after Democrat Gray Davis succeeded Wilson, the state abandoned an appeal of Pfaelzer’s ruling. In subsequent years the Legislature repealed other laws, such as the one on driver’s licenses, and has done whatever it could to treat undocumented immigrants as if they were legal residents, such as expanding health care benefits.

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 and promised a crackdown on illegal immigration, California reacted with legislation to make it more difficult for federal immigration authorities to capture and deport undocumented Californians.

The most important was Senate Bill 54, introduced a month after Trump won the election. Dubbed the California Values Act, it essentially bars California police from aiding in any way federal efforts to identify and deport undocumented immigrants.

SB 54 survived one court challenge but Trump is once again in the White House, declaring his intention to rid the nation of undocumented immigrants, and is taking aim at California and other states with sanctuary laws.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit to overturn Illinois laws quite similar to California’s SB 54, and its contention in the Illinois suit could — with great irony — convert the federal court decision against Prop. 187 three decades ago ago into a hammer to smash SB 54. If California was illegally interfering with the federal government’s exclusive power over immigration in Prop. 187, the suit implies, sanctuary laws also interfere with that power.

The 23-page complaint, filed in federal court in Chicago, alleges that Illinois laws “have the purpose and effect of making it more difficult for, and deliberately impeding, federal immigration officers’ ability to carry out their responsibilities in those jurisdictions.”

California officials are aware that the Illinois suit will not be the only challenge to local and state laws meant to protect undocumented immigrants.

Were the Illinois suit’s argument to prevail, the situation in California could come full circle. A legal principle that protected California’s immigrants from Prop. 187 in 1995 might make identifying and deporting them easier in 2025.