California legal experts answer top questions about immigration in the U.S.
Watch the conversation in the video above.
How can an immigrant achieve legal status in the U.S.? Has the process gotten harder? Do undocumented immigrants have the right to due process?
La Abeja, McClatchy’s team of journalists that covers Latino issues, spoke with advocates and attorneys on Tuesday, March 25, to answer some of the most pressing questions about immigration during President Donald Trump’s second term. Already, the Trump administration has created fear and uncertainty for immigrants as it moves aggressively to fulfill its promise of mass deportations.
Uncertainty has not spared the Central Valley — a region historically targeted for immigration arrests and one where more than 20% of residents are foreign-born, according to data from UC Merced.
“They are as important a role in the Central Valley as any other social group,” Jesus Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, said. “And because of their numbers, the Central Valley economy would not exist as it is without those contributions.”
Martinez joined Matias Bernal, development director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, and immigration attorneys Lazaro Salazar and Olga Grosh Pratt for this discussion about the legal system immigrants are facing today.
Here is what they said.
Legal pathways ‘not accessible to everyone’
Pratt, an attorney with Pasifika Immigration Law Group in Fresno, said there are various legal pathways for immigrating to the U.S., including through family, employment and humanitarian reasons.
“But these are not accessible to everyone all the time,” she said.
Despite the thought that “anchor babies” provide citizenship to foreign-born parents, Pratt said the U.S. does not allow anyone to automatically attain lawful status just because they have a U.S. citizen child. They often have to leave the country for 10 years unless they are granted a Waiver of Grounds of Inadmissibility, which those parents can only apply for if their own parent or spouse is a U.S. citizen or U.S.resident.
“Politicians who often use this term (anchor baby) are unaware of how immigration truly works,” Pratt said. “It’s not enough to just send an application, it’s not enough to just pay money.”
She said the Trump administration has already begun making changes to how citizenship interviews are conducted. Previously, immigration officers had more discretion to choose which questions they could ask applicants, many of whom are English learners and are answering citizenship questions in English. Now, officers are asking nearly every question on the citizenship form, Pratt said.
“It ends up being an extra English test,” she said. “And this form for citizenship has a lot of strange words that are very old and very archaic.”
Backlog for immigration cases
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, there was a backlog of 3.8 million cases for people seeking to attain some sort of legalized status in the country as of September 2024.
“These are cases that are ready to go but have not been adjudicated by immigration,” Pratt said.
For asylum seekers, the backlog of cases surpassed 1 million. For people who qualify for waivers of ground of inadmissibility, the backlog neared 300,000, she said. Residency applications waiting to be processed were nearly 1 million, and citizenship applications waiting to be processed were near 515,000.
“People who are doing it right, who are paying money to our federal government to be approved by them, are just sitting there for no reason at all,” Pratt said.
‘All people’ people have due process rights
The Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador has sparked conversations about whether undocumented immigrants have the right to due process, which refers to rights in the court system.
The president’s team removed these immigrants after alleging they are gang members. The move defied a federal judge’s order and the administration has resisted providing records that courts have demanded.
“The bottom line here is due process is a big, obvious cornerstone of our Constitution,” said Salazar, an attorney with Lazaro Salazar Law in Fresno. “All people, including undocumented people, have the right to confront ... the government who is alleging they don’t have documents, that they have some kind of criminal history.”
Even when there is a basis for deportation, Salazar said, the law affords the individual facing removal to present a defense.
“That applies equally to people who have no status whatsoever and people who have legal permanent residency,” he said. “And that’s the key here. It’s the attack, the complete disregard for due process, that is a big concern.”
What’s else has Trump changed for immigrants?
For Bernal, of the California Immigrant Policy Center’s Los Angeles office, the Trump administration’s narrative is similar to the one pushed during his first term: It’s pitting immigrants against each other “by creating the good immigrant and the bad immigrant.”
“In Trump 2.0 we’re seeing the attacks coming to all immigrant communities,” Bernal said.
He said federal funding cuts threaten the initiatives that immigrants have won in California, such as the expansion of healthcare to all low-income people who qualify for Medi-Cal, regardless of immigration status.
“The problem with the current administration is that they’re going beyond simply denying to also engaging in unconstitutional measures, like trying to deny citizenship,” said Martinez, of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative.
Pratt said immigration has always been a civil issue, “but the administration is trying to criminalize it.”
The upheaval of immigration policy has also caused a lot of unknowns for attorneys, she said.
“We are so used to being, ‘OK, this is the law, these are the facts of a case,’” she said. “We apply facts of the case to law. But right now, so much is up in the air because the policies are being turned upside down.”
Esta historia fue publicada originalmente el 28 de marzo de 2025, 10:08 a. m. with the headline "California legal experts answer top questions about immigration in the U.S.."
