Haley's hardline immigration record runs counter to Trump's attacks

Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have spent weeks portraying Nikki Haley as a bleeding heart on immigration as he tries to dispatch her as his last remaining rival for the 2024 Republican nomination.

In Mr. Trump's words, Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a “globalist” who reversed her support for Mr. Trump's hardline policies before serving as his ambassador to the United States . the United Nations. Ahead of the two candidates' showdown in the South Carolina primary on February 24, his surrogates have accused her of being a secret liberal who supports open borders and won't do enough to curb the flow of migrants and refugees into the country .

But it's a portrait almost unrecognizable to many who knew her as governor: the Republican state lawmakers who counted on her support for immigration restrictions; the longtime immigrant rights activists in South Carolina who fought her on the legislation; the conservative religious leaders who were disappointed by her opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to resettle in the state. Trump's attacks are complicated by her record as a staunch conservative on the issue, they said, even as she maintained her support for legal immigration as her party shifted its focus to more extreme immigration restrictions.

Larry Grooms, a South Carolina state senator who in 2011 helped push through the immigration restrictions that Ms. Haley is now pushing, said it was disheartening to hear from Republican colleagues who were in the trenches with him on that bill now joining in Mr. Trump's attacks on her on the issue.

“It was one of the toughest battles I've ever fought in the Legislature, and if Nikki Haley hadn't rolled up her sleeves and pushed the ball, it wouldn't have happened,” he said, citing distortions of her record service wrong. and 'unfair'. He has supported Ms. Haley.

Since she entered politics in 2004, Ms. Haley has held positions on immigration that have remained largely consistent, as evidenced by a review of her past statements, her legislative history, and interviews with both supporters and opponents. She has long advocated improving legal routes into the United States while aggressively restricting illegal ones. And she often bases her beliefs on her own heritage.

“I am the proud daughter of legal immigrants – emphasis on the legal,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “Can't Is Not an Option.” Her parents, she wrote, left a prosperous life in India before eventually migrating to Canada and the United States, although she and her associates declined to provide details.

As a state lawmaker in 2008, Ms. Haley supported legislation that turned South Carolina into a coup the first state to explicitly prohibit undocumented students from enrolling in public colleges and universities. But it was the tough immigration measures she signed in 2011 that thrust South Carolina into the national spotlight. At the time, a faction of the conservative Tea Party movement That helped propel her own rise in politics and fueled a broader wave of crackdowns in the Sun Belt, just as states in the Deep South saw increases in their small Latino populations.

The South Carolina measures, which were modeled on Arizona's strict “show-me-your-papers” law and went nearly as far, prompted a lawsuit from the Obama administration while fueling concerns that this would encourage the racial and ethnic profiling of Latinos. . It too prohibited professional licenses for undocumented immigrants, excluding even those who attended private or foreign universities from certain professions in the state.

Mr. Grooms said Ms. Haley helped align members of her party in the final push to get the deal approved. Tom Davis, a Republican senator in South Carolina who is backing Ms. Haley's presidential bid, pointed to her seal of approval for the bill as an example that Trump's claims about her record were “pure fiction.”

“Anyone who looks at Nikki Haley's record and says she's progressive or says she's not conservative is just not doing their homework,” he said.

And yet Ms. Haley found herself caught up in her party's shifting headwinds on immigration, as reform deals failed in Congress and her party's immigration hawks moved further to the right.

In 2015, Ms. Haley faced backlash from local Republicans for her support of Republicans efforts of faith groups to resettle people in South Carolina. She ultimately took an aggressive stance against the resettlement of Syrians in her state after the terror attacks in Paris that same year, citing intelligence gaps that could complicate the vetting process.

The following year Mrs. Haley delivered the Republican response to President Obama's final State of the Union address. She urged not to follow “the siren call of the angriest voices” and extended a hand of welcome to immigrants who play by the rules — a move that many of her Republican critics still see as a rebuke of Trump's demonizing rhetoric during his campaign.

Lee Bright, a former senator who is not aligned with the 2024 race, claimed that Ms. Haley was more conservative on the issue when she entered the State House but appeared to become more liberal over time. During the debate over Syrian refugees, he recalled, she would have ruined the prospects of a bill that would have held aid agencies liable for violent acts committed in the US by anyone they sponsored.

Now, he argues, Ms. Haley is getting more credit than she deserves for the tough legislation Republican state lawmakers have written.

“President Trump is absolutely right,” he said, she is “a flip-flopper.”

Ms. Haley is campaigning in her home state and has fired back more forcefully against attacks on her record, though she faces an uphill battle. Trump, who continues to dominate the polls in South Carolina by double digits, has more than 80 current and former Republican state officials endorsing his campaign, including Governor Henry McMaster and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.

In recent days, she has argued that when she signed that 2011 legislation, Trump was “still a New York liberal” and donated money to Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris. She has called him “irresponsible” for his recent intervention in a Republican-led immigration deal in Congress, slowing progress as the crisis at the border grows.

She continues to express support for renewing options for legal immigration, based on business need and merit, and for strengthening the asylum system that she says protects persecuted people, such as the Afghan interpreters who support her husband, Major Michael Haley. helped when he was abroad. But her positions on illegal immigration have kept pace with her party's new conservative extremes under Trump: She has expressed support for deploying the military against Mexican drug cartels, restricting birthright rights and sending millions of migrants back to their home countries .

She supports the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which grants work permits and temporary legal status to 570,000 people brought to the United States as children. But she calls it the “carrot” on the stick that should be used to push for a broader and tougher overhaul of immigration laws.

Mr. Trump, in ads, interviews and rallies, has promised a return to his own hardline policies if elected and has escalated his rhetoric on the southern border, describing undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The impact of the measures South Carolina instituted in 2011 is difficult to quantify. Federal courts blocked some aspects, including provisions requiring law enforcement to check the immigration status of some people at routine stops and requiring immigrants to carry federal registration documents. But a portion of the law that required illegal immigrants to be transferred from state to federal custody was upheld.

The most important provision that remains untouched to this day requires companies to verify that their employees are legally in the country. But a 2018 study from the Cato Institutea libertarian research center, found that it had serious problems because it misidentified a small number of legal workers as undocumented, imposed expensive costs and regulatory burdens on companies, and fueled a black market in document forgery and identity theft.

In interviews, Mexican immigrant students and activists, some of whom were undocumented, recalled living in fear of authorities during Ms. Haley's two terms in office, barely leaving their homes and remaining alert for raids.

Erika Hernandez Perez, 26, a DACA recipient who was enrolled in cosmetology classes, said her career dreams were crushed when she was barred from obtaining her license in 2015, when South Carolina, under Ms. Haley, became states that persisted in full recognition the DACA program..

She eventually went to work for her parents' food truck and saved enough money to open her own restaurant in Greenville, serving her native Oaxacan dishes.

“I understand her position on illegal immigration because, as she has said before, her parents came here legally,” she said of Ms. Haley. But she added that she also wished Ms. Haley had more sympathy for young immigrants whose parents were not wealthy or highly educated.

Diana Mesa, 21, who was in high school in 2011, remembers the tensions in her small Latino community in Spartanburg, S.C., amid the crackdown. She was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, and moved to South Carolina as a child after her father got a job at a BMW factory. Although she and her parents had legal status, other family members did not, and they often had to watch each other, she said.

“It was really a taste,” she recalled, of what was to come under Trump.

Susan C. Beachy research contributed.