[NYT] Nobody knows yet what Donald Trump is going to do to immigration enforcement. Only a month has passed since the election, and the president-elect is no different from the candidate: erratic, self-contradictory, hazy on principles and policies.But states and cities that value immigrants, including the undocumented, do not have the luxury of waiting and hoping for the best. They are girding for a confrontation, building defenses to protect families and workers from the next administration.
They fear that Mr. Trump, who ran on a pledge of mass deportation, dehumanizing immigrants and refugees, will remove humane discretion from immigration enforcement. They understand that not all unauthorized immigrants are criminals, that not all should be detained or deported and that the country cannot enforce its way out of its failure to reform unjust immigration laws.
But they know that the nativist ideologues and white nationalists around Mr. Trump are itching for him to be merciless. They know that if he does anything close to what he has repeatedly vowed to do -- set dragnets for millions of unauthorized immigrants, triple the number of enforcement officers, immediately revoke President Obama’s administrative actions shielding young people from deportation and pull federal funds from cities that defend immigrants -- their prudence will have been justified.