Forty-eight hours after protesters filled the streets across the nation, many to decry the mass deportations being carried out by the Trump administration, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal told the Journal the time is right for Congress to pursue comprehensive immigration reform.
Honsal said he supports providing a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country without permission who are otherwise law-abiding residents contributing to their communities, while also believing it’s necessary to secure the nation’s southern border and make efforts to find and deport those committing crimes.
“I think now is the perfect time,” Honsal said, referencing the national interest in the issue and the need for a rational approach. “But we need someone in Congress to lead.”
North Coast Congressmember Jared Huffman’s legislative platform has long included comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to legal status for many of the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. But he has repeatedly said such legislation is a nonstarter with the current polarized makeup of Congress.
As the head of Humboldt County’s largest law enforcement agency and the county’s drug task force, as well as the custodian of its jail, Honsal has more insight than many into how immigration issues impact the county and its residents. And he says it’s clear the system isn’t working.
This, of course, isn’t a secret to those paying attention, no matter their politics. Congress has been discussing comprehensive immigration reform for decades, pretty much since the last reform measure was passed during the Reagan administration. But the issue is politically fraught, especially since Trump made it the cornerstone of his first campaign for president in 2016.
Honsal said he doesn’t think most in Humboldt County understand the impact from the Biden administration’s rollbacks of some of the border security policies enacted during the first Trump administration. According to the nonpartisan PEW Research Center, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border spiked from a low of 16,182 in April of 2020 to a record 249,741 in December of 2023, prompting Biden to take efforts he’d eschewed earlier in his presidency.
“I’m not sure people really understand what that did to the federal judiciary,” Honsal said, explaining that the large-scale influx of people across the U.S.-Mexico border overwhelmed the system to the point where some asylum seekers were being given initial court dates a decade into the future. (A 2023 Associated Press article indicates asylum-seekers were getting court dates four to 10 years into the future, depending upon the jurisdiction.)
From a law enforcement perspective, Honsal says he believes Biden’s border policies made it easier for drug trafficking organizations to smuggle fentanyl into the U.S. In fact, the sheriff says drug task force agents are now reporting that — less than three months into Trump’s presidency — the potent synthetic opioid has become harder to find.
“Just in the last couple months, fentanyl prices have gone up,” he said.
Honsal said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents also recently showed up to take custody of a man — a Jamaican immigrant with a prior felony domestic violence conviction — being released from the Humboldt County jail, noting this didn’t happen once under the prior administration.
But while he supports border security, Honsal said he does not support the desire of some hardline conservatives — including members of the Trump administration — that everyone who is in the country without legal status should be rounded up and deported. Such rhetoric, he said, causes “paranoia and fear in the community,” adding that he believes there are lots of undocumented people “who are working hard and part of our communities and law-abiding” who should have an “easier” pathway to citizenship or legal status.
“There needs to be a balance,” Honsal said.
Asked about the reported violations of the due process rights of hundreds of people who have been deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador in recent weeks, Honsal said he doesn’t have enough direct information to comment on the specific cases. However, he said he believes everyone in this country has due process rights and should have the ability to hear and contest accusations against them. And he said if the Trump administration does have cause and the authority to deport people, it should be issuing daily lists of who’s been removed from this country, on what authority and for what reasons. As a parallel, he said he couldn’t operate the jail without being transparent with the public about who has been booked into the facility every day and why they are being held.
“It would be like this shadow government — I need to be transparent,” Honsal said, adding that he thinks the administration should stop issuing vague statements about the number of people deported and instead provide specific, verifiable information. “I could care less about 150 people — tell me who they are and what they did.”
In the case of the more than 200 Venezuelan migrants who were detained in the U.S. and deported to the prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration has released minimal information about them, other than to allege most are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump has dubbed a terrorist organization. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the deportees must be given a chance to challenge their removal, later blocking further efforts by the administration to deport more people under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives a president power to deport citizens of “enemy nations” without going through the usual deportation process. Other federal courts have criticized the administration for providing insufficient information — including showings of probable cause that they are gang members or have committed other crimes — about deportees.
Beyond potential rights violations, Honsal said he has other concerns about labeling street gangs as terrorist organizations, as well as the apparent breadth of the deportation effort Trump has pledged will be the largest in the nation’s history.
Honsal said partner federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI — have indicated they’ve been tapped to help with immigration enforcement efforts.
“If FBI and Homeland Security are focusing on immigration, they’re not doing their jobs,” he said, which should be targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals and weeding out true terrorist threats, which Honsal said intelligence suggests are as high as they were before 9/11. “This is something that keeps me up at night.”
Honsal said the other thing that keeps him up at night is the idea that undocumented community members’ fear of law enforcement and deportation might leave some crimes unreported and some victims in danger and unsupported. He stressed repeatedly that local law enforcement does not work with federal agencies enforcing immigration law and is legally prohibited from doing so under state and local law.
“Local law enforcement will not be asking for anyone’s immigration status ever,” he said. “We are here to serve the community, whether you are a citizen here, a resident here, or not. We are here to enforce state and local law and keep our community safe.”
Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.
This article appears in ‘If Only We’d Done More to Save Her’.
