Orange County once was an anti-immigrant hotbed. What changed?

For decades, I could count on my native Orange County to act against immigrants, legal and not, as regularly as the swallows returned to Capistrano. It was like a civic version of the Broadway classic “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),” except not as clever and with more xenophobia.

Cue the lowlight reel!

• In a 1986 article in Time magazine, Newport Beach resident Harold Ezell, then director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Western region, criticized immigrants who use fraudulent papers. “If you catch ‘em, you ought to clean ‘em and fry ‘em yourself,” he said.
• Republicans illegally posted uniformed security guards outside voting booths in Santa Ana in 1988 with signs stating noncitizens couldn’t vote.
• A group of residents — including Ezell — drafted Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot measure that sought to make life miserable for “illegal aliens” and their children. After downing margaritas at El Torito, they named the initiative “Save Our State.”
• In 1996, the Anaheim City Council allowed immigration authorities to screen the legal status of detainees in the city jail — the first program of its kind in California.
• Three years later, Anaheim Union High School District trustees passed a resolution to sue Mexico for $50 million for the cost of educating people like me, who were the children of unauthorized immigrants.
• Long before it became a GOP tradition, local Republican candidates and politicians took trips to the border to boast about how tough they were on the “invasion.”
• In 2005, Mission Viejo grandfather Jim Gilchrist created the Minuteman Project, which enlisted suburbanites to help the Border Patrol find migrants who illegally crossed into this country. That same year, Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor tried to get police officers to enforce federal immigration laws, which would have been a first in the nation.

From theorizing about how to repeal birthright citizenship to suing California over its “sanctuary” state law and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold detainees in city and county jails, Orange County has shown the rest of the country how to be as punitive as possible toward the undocumented. With Donald Trump in the White House again, this Know Nothing legacy has its most powerful acolyte ever.

If you’re against mass deportations and want to see some sort of amnesty, it’s easy to feel deflated and even easier to curse Orange County for its past. I’ve been doing the latter for nearly all of my adult life — first as a college activist, then as a columnist. It’s a subject I wish I could leave but — to paraphrase Michael Corleone — it keeps pulling me back in.

Because I’ve covered Orange County for a quarter-century, though, I haven’t lost all hope. I know the result of O.C.’s scorched-earth campaigns against illegal immigration: initially shoving the national conversation rightward, but eventually, repeatedly, becoming the political equivalent of an exploding cigar.

Though Proposition 187 passed, it famously made my generation of California Latinos vote Democratic for decades and permanently kneecapped the O.C. GOP. The local anger over the ballot initiative led to Loretta Sanchez’s historic 1996 win over incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan, as she became the first O.C. Latino elected to Congress. Her victory was so stunning that a House subcommittee investigated Dornan’s claims that immigrants illegally voted in the election and swung it for Sanchez (they didn’t).

The Minuteman Project? It quickly fizzled out.

John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman’s law school who sparked Trump’s interest in banning birthright citizenship with a cockamamie 2020 article claiming Kamala Harris wasn’t a “natural born citizen”? He faces disbarment for pushing Trump’s unfounded claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.

Costa Mesa? It now has a progressive, Latino-majority City Council that has loudly distanced itself from Mansoor’s actions.

Naui Huitzilopochtli, a pro-immigrant supporter, attempts to taunt attendees at the fundraiser held at the Fairview Park in Costa Mesa for then-Mayor Allan Mansoor in 2006. Mansoor had proposed to train the city’s police officers to enforce federal immigration laws.

(Javier Manzano/Los Angeles Times)

As the years went on, trashing immigrants for political gain in Orange County just wasn’t as popular or effective as before. Trump, despite his noxious rhetoric over three presidential campaigns, never won the county. A UC Irvine School of Social Ecology poll released this month showed that 28% of O.C. residents thought immigration was a “top problem” locally — compare that with a 1993 Times poll putting that number at 80%. Meanwhile, the UC Irvine poll found that 58% of people in O.C. favored some type of legal status for immigrants who have none, while 35% preferred deportation.

This ain’t John Wayne’s Orange County anymore. Hell, it’s not mine. What changed?

Demographics, for one. In 1990, as anger against illegal immigration was beginning to rage in Southern California, whites were 65% of the county. Fourteen years later, U.S. census figures showed they had become a minority in O.C. The latest stats put whites at just 37%. Nearly a third of residents are foreign-born, with immigrants living all across the county and occupying all rungs of the social ladder. It’s harder to trash them when they’re your neighbors, your children’s friends, your in-laws or your co-workers, you know?

Those changing demographics also led to the political purpling of the county. Few O.C. politicians outside of Huntington Beach’s MAGA City Council have publicly praised Trump’s promises to clamp down on immigration. Even O.C. Sheriff Don Barnes — who’s about as liberal as a Winchester rifle and who has drastically increased the number of jail inmates his department turned over to immigration authorities — put out a news release this week asserting that his deputies “remain focused on the enforcement of state and local laws,” rather than joining Trump’s deportation posse.

Most of all, it’s the activists who have had enough of the old Orange County. There’s always been pushback against anti-immigrant lunacy here. When I was a sophomore at Anaheim High, thousands of high school students walked out of class to protest Proposition 187. In 2006, there was a huge rally in Santa Ana — along with other marches in the rest of the country — to protest a congressional bill that would have made Proposition 187 seem as friendly as President Reagan’s amnesty. But most of those efforts were haphazard, devolved into infighting among Chicanosauruses and didn’t develop into a full-fledged movement.

Over the last 15 years, activists who grew up here — and not just Latinos — have organized rallies, staged sit-ins and formed nonprofits or community-based groups that coalesced into a multifront network standing up for people without papers. They campaigned to kick ICE out of local jails, aided various lawsuits seeking to change local policies and even helped pro-immigrant candidates populate school boards and city councils.

If such a loud, successful resistance can happen in Orange County, it can happen anywhere. It’s not easy, but it’s possible — nay, necessary.

One of the people fighting the good fight is Santa Ana native Sandra De Anda. She’s a network coordinator for Orange County Rapid Response Network, which connects immigrants to legal help and runs a hotline to report ICE sightings.

The 31-year-old grew up on Minnie Street in a historically Cambodian and Latino neighborhood where migra detained residents “all the time.” When she returned to her hometown from Portland, Ore., in 2017, De Anda began to volunteer for pro-immigrant groups “and never looked back.”

She’s proud of how far Orange County has come and is more committed than ever to her cause. Friends and family worry for her safety, but De Anda remains undeterred.

“There’s such a nasty conservative tradition here, but our folks have still been here just as long,” she told me in a matter-of-fact tone after a long day of work. “We deserve to stay here. We’re going to have to fight together through any means necessary for the next four years.”