SALT LAKE CITY — Numerous proposals from those pressing for more action to crack down on illegal immigration emerged during the Utah legislative session.
Most stalled or failed to gain traction, however, and an immigrant advocate who follows immigration matters closely suspects a couple of things factored into the inaction, including that immigration law and policy are the domain chiefly of federal lawmakers.
“The federal government needs to fix immigration. That is not within our purview or jurisdiction,” said Utah Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Mexico, she represents a diverse section of the city’s west side and said the immigration issue is of growing concern for some of her constituents.
She also cited the continued influence of the Utah Compact on Immigration, initially adopted in 2010 and reaffirmed in 2019. The compact, signed by a cross-section of Utahns and reps from a range of business and nonprofit organizations, is a set of principles calling for “a humane approach” in contending with immigration, among other things.
The principles “still resonate now,” Escamilla said, and some of the legislative proposals that emerged “were really going against the Utah Compact.”
Detaining and deporting immigrants in the country illegally is a priority of the administration of President Donald Trump and a major concern for many. It’s a big issue in Utah as well, and Utah lawmakers proposed several bills targeting illegal immigration and immigrants in the country illegally in the session that ended last week.
One proposal would have eliminated the state’s driver privilege card program, which lets immigrants in the country illegally secure documentation allowing them to legally drive on Utah’s roads. Another would have required more widespread use among Utah employers of the E-Verify system to prevent the hiring of immigrants in the country illegally. A third, which garnered the most public attention, would have prevented immigrants in the country illegally from tapping into government benefits. Those, among others, stalled or, in the case of the driver privilege card initiative, never got a hearing in the first place.
Lawmakers approved two measures that bear on immigration, one creating new safeguards against voting by immigrants. The other, meant to keep unlicensed drivers off the roads by letting police impound their cars, targets all unlicensed motorists, though part of the debate focused on what some see as the worrisome impact of immigrant drivers without licenses.
During the session, Utah Rep. Trevor Lee, R-Layton, voiced support for increased efforts targeting immigrants in the country illegally. He sponsored the driver privilege card measure and the proposal that would have prevented immigrants in the country illegally from accessing state-funded benefits like immunizations, food at food pantries, space at homeless shelters, crisis counseling and more.
He didn’t respond to a query for comment, but had argued that the availability of driver privilege cards serves as a magnet to immigrants in the country illegally. Halting it, he said, would be one way to temper the incentive for them to come to Utah. In promoting the measure related to state-funded benefits, Lee said reserving such services for citizens was “our fiscal and moral responsibility” in part to be good stewards of public funds.
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Escamilla, for her part, said availability of jobs is the key magnet for immigrants in the country illegally, countering Lee’s contentions about the driver privilege card program. More significantly, perhaps, she said, ending the driver privilege card program could lead to more unlicensed drivers on Utah’s roads, creating a public safety issue.
The initiative related to benefits like crisis counseling and even provision of health care to children in the country illegally came across as “targeting families and children,” she said.
Beyond that, Escamilla said the immigration question is complex and that immigrants in the country illegally fall into a wide range of categories, including those who illegally crossed into the country, asylum-seekers and others trying to regularize their migratory status.
“One of my concerns with trying to address this issue is how people think it’s so simple, and it’s not,” she said.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
