Column: Gaspar tries to ride Trump’s ‘sanctuary’ lawsuit into Congress
Supervisor Kristin Gaspar was a driving force behind the county’s decision to support the federal lawsuit challenging California’s immigrant sanctuary laws.
For the time being, the action on Tuesday amounts to making a statement, given that it only authorizes a potential legal move, possibly far in the future.
So while the county bides its time, the immediate question becomes whether Gaspar has turned this into a breakout moment in her bid for Congress.
Since she proposed the county take a stand in this contentious dispute, Gaspar has received a lot of media attention, seemingly becoming a regular on Fox news and talk shows — though sometimes in the wee hours of the morning.
Gaspar made a splash in January when she entered the campaign to replace Rep. Darrell Issa, who is not seeking re-election. She had been a supervisor for just over a year and the race already was crowded with well-known Republicans and Democrats, some with considerable financial resources.
She slogged along early, with down-in-the-pack poll numbers and modest fundraising, though the latter has been improving. Then Gaspar, who had been viewed as a rising local Republican star, suffered a big setback earlier this month when the San Diego GOP endorsed one of her rivals, state Board of Equalization member and former state legislator Diane Harkey — from Orange County. Harkey had already gained the nod from her home county GOP.
Gaspar needs a game-changer in the primary campaign if she’s going to advance to the November election in the 49th Congressional District. But there is political reward and risk from jumping into the immigration cauldron — and being seen as one of Trump’s warriors on this front can be both.
It’s a potent political issue among the Republican base — as Trump has shown — and Harkey has a lot of the leaders from that camp in her corner already. By going after the sanctuary laws, Gaspar clearly is making a play for that base, if not its leaders. She may have no place else to go. Front-runner Assemblyman Rocky Chávez, never a favorite of party conservatives, has appeal to moderates.
Chávez, R-Oceanside, had a solid lead in the latest San Diego Union-Tribune/10News poll published April 12. At 16 percent support, he doubled Harkey’s 8 percent. Gaspar came in with 5 percent, tying her with San Juan Capistrano City Councilman Brian Maryott. There were four Democrats polling ahead of Gaspar, and it’s doubtful she’ll be able to cut substantially into their votes, especially after her sanctuary law gambit.
An early poll may not be worth much in the long run, but at the very least it gives a sense of how the field of 16 stands at the moment. Gaspar has to rise above all but one of them to move out of the primary, where the two candidates with the most votes win a spot on the fall ballot regardless of party affiliation.
In November, she would face a far different and even more politically perilous dynamic. Unless she’s paired up with a conservative — highly unlikely — she’ll be politically joined at the hip with Trump.
While not mentioning Gaspar, Trump pretty much guaranteed that.
“Thank you San Diego County for defending the rule of law and supporting our lawsuit against California’s illegal and unconstitutional ‘Sanctuary’ policies. California’s dangerous policies release violent criminals back into our communities, putting all Americans at risk,” the president said Thursday on Twitter.
Gov. Jerry Brown says the law is structured so those kinds of criminals are not being released, but turned over to federal authorities.
Regardless, ask Issa how being linked to the president worked for him. His prominent support for Trump in 2016 almost cost him his re-election that year. He appeared doomed this time around and threw in the towel. Until Trump, Democrats never had much of a chance in that district. Now they do.
The 49th district includes mostly coastal areas of southern Orange and northern San Diego counties. Republicans still have a voter registration advantage, but it has shrunk over time. Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by more than seven percentage points in the district.
(The previous paragraph has been updated with the correct percentage margin for Clinton.)
Before running for Congress, Gaspar had the image of a moderate pragmatist, having served as mayor of Encinitas. Many moderate Republicans are steering clear of the sanctuary law dispute, including Supervisors Greg Cox and Ron Roberts, who urged their colleagues not to get involved.
There’s certainly a question about how pragmatic it was to back the Trump suit, which was supported by Supervisors Bill Horn, Dianne Jacob and Gaspar. The deadline to file a “friend of the court” brief passed two weeks ago. So the three supervisors directed county lawyers to file an amicus brief at the next available opportunity, which would likely be if and when the case is appealed.
Other Republican strongholds, including Orange County and city of Escondido, took more timely action to join the federal lawsuit. Cox, among others, called the San Diego move symbolic, though supporters insisted it wasn’t.
The administration lawsuit seeks to overturn three California laws. The one getting all the attention is SB 54, which prohibits police from asking the immigration status of people they come in contact with, and restricts local law enforcement from giving federal authorities information about when unauthorized immigrants are released from jail unless they have been convicted of one of more than 800 crimes, mostly felonies but some misdemeanors.
Gaspar, Jacob and other critics of the law said their concern is public safety. “We were safer before SB 54,” Gaspar said at a news conference with Jacob after Tuesday’s vote.
Gaspar’s office later said that as of Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had requested notifications for 487 inmate releases by the county since the law went into effect Jan. 1, but only 203 notifications could be made under SB 54. It was unclear if any of those released without notification were subsequently picked up by ICE.
While Gaspar has become a Fox fixture, Jacob attracted a lot of local television coverage that day when she linked illegal border crossings with potential terrorism
“We have people that are on the terrorist watch list that are coming across the border,” she said.
“...These are people who come into our country not only committing crimes in our neighborhood but also want to do us harm just because we are Americans.”
Pressed for details, Jacob said she was told that one person on the watch list was apprehended, and it turned out to be some time ago. SB 54, even if in effect, likely wouldn’t have had any impact on that.
Meanwhile, as San Diego officials pushed to do away with state laws that make it harder to deport some immigrants, just the opposite was happening in Washington, D.C.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote struck down part of a federal law that sought to facilitate deportations, with the majority contending it was unconstitutionally vague.
The swing vote was Trump’s appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
