Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have spent weeks portraying Nikki Haley as a bleeding-heart immigration crusader as he tries to eliminate 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 abandoned her support for Mr. Trump’s hardline policies before serving as his ambassador to the United Nations. Ahead of the showdown between the two candidates in South Carolina’s Feb. 24 primary, his surrogates have accused her of being a closet liberal who supports open borders and won’t do enough to stem 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 lawmakers who counted on her support for immigration restrictions; the longtime immigrant rights activists in South Carolina who fought her over the legislation; the conservative religious leaders who were disappointed by their opposition to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the state. Mr. Trump’s attacks are complicated by the fact that she is a staunch conservative on the issue, they said, even as she continued to support legal immigration as her party shifted its focus to more extreme immigration cuts.
Larry Grooms, a South Carolina state senator who in 2011 spearheaded passage of the immigration restrictions that Ms. Haley is now pushing, said it was disheartening to hear Republican colleagues who joined him on the legislation were now participating in Mr. Trump’s attacks against them on this issue.
“It was one of the toughest battles I’ve ever fought in the legislative session, and if Nikki Haley hadn’t rolled up her sleeves and pushed the ball forward, it wouldn’t have passed,” he said, calling distortions of her record false and “unfair.” . He supported Ms. Haley.
Since entering politics in 2004, Ms. Haley has held views on immigration that have remained largely consistent, according to a review of her past statements, her legislative work and interviews with both supporters and critics. She has long advocated for improving legal routes into the United States while aggressively curbing illegal routes. And she often bases her faith on her own origins.
“I am the proud daughter of legal immigrants – emphasis is on the legal,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir “Can’t Do It, Isn’t an Option.” Her parents, she wrote, left a wealthy life in India before eventually moving to Canada and emigrated to the United States, although she and her associates have declined to provide details.
As a state legislator in 2008, Ms. Haley sponsored legislation that made South Carolina the first state to explicitly ban 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, which had fueled its own rise in politics, was fomenting a broader wave of crackdowns across the Sun Belt, just as states in the Deep South were experiencing a surge in their small Latino populations.
South Carolina’s measures, which were modeled on Arizona’s strict show-me-your-papers law and went virtually the same length, led to a lawsuit from the Obama administration while raising concerns that they were increasing racial and ethnic profiling of Latinos would promote. It also banned undocumented immigrants from professional licenses and even barred those who attended private or out-of-state colleges from some jobs in the state.
Mr. Grooms said Ms. Haley helped bring members of her party together in the final push for passage. Tom Davis, a Republican state senator in South Carolina who supports Ms. Haley’s presidential bid, pointed to her seal of approval on the bill as an example that Mr. Trump’s claims about her record are “pure fiction.”
“Anyone who looks at Nikki Haley’s resume and says she’s progressive or not conservative is simply not doing their homework,” he said.
And yet Ms. Haley found herself caught 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 supporting faith groups’ efforts to relocate people in South Carolina. After the terrorist attacks in Paris that same year, she finally took an aggressive stance against the resettlement of Syrians in her state, citing gaps in intelligence that could complicate the vetting process.
The next year, Ms. Haley delivered the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address. She warned against answering “the siren call of the angriest voices” and reached out to immigrants who play by the rules — a move that many of her Republican critics still see as a rebuke to Trump’s demonizing rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Lee Bright, a former state senator who is a nonpartisan in the 2024 race, claimed that Ms. Haley was more conservative on the issue when she entered the House but appears to have become more liberal over time. During the debate over Syrian refugees, he recalled, she reportedly doomed the prospects of a bill that would have made aid groups liable for acts of violence in the United States that they sponsored.
Now, he argues, Ms. Haley is getting more credit than she deserves for hard-line legislation written by Republican state lawmakers.
“President Trump is exactly right,” he said, that she was “a flip-flopper.”
Campaigning in her home state, Ms. Haley has taken a more forceful stance against attacks on her career, even though she faces an uphill battle. Mr. Trump, who continues to dominate by double digits in the polls in South Carolina, has more than 80 current and former Republican state officials supporting his campaign, including Gov. Henry McMaster and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.
In recent days, she argued that when she signed the 2011 law, Mr. Trump was “still a New York liberal” and donated to Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris. She called him “irresponsible” for recently intervening in a Republican-led immigration deal in Congress, blocking progress as the crisis at the border grows.
She continues to express support for redesigning legal immigration pathways based on business need and merit and strengthening the asylum system, which she says protects persecuted people like the Afghan interpreters who helped her husband, Maj. Michael Haley, while he was abroad . But her stance on illegal immigration has 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 returning millions of migrants to their home countries.
She supports the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides work authorization and temporary legal status to 570,000 people brought to the United States as children. But she calls it the “carrot” to the stick that must be used to push for a broader and tougher overhaul of immigration laws.
Mr. Trump, in ads, interviews and rallies, is promising a return to his own hardline policies if elected, and has ratcheted up his rhetoric about the southern border, calling undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The impact of restrictions implemented in South Carolina in 2011 is difficult to quantify. Federal courts blocked some aspects, including provisions that required law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of some people during routine stops and required immigrants to carry federal registration documents. But part of the law requiring the transfer of illegal immigrants from state to federal custody was upheld.
The most important provision, which remains untouched to this day, requires companies to check whether their employees are legally in the country. But a 2018 study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian research center, concluded that it had serious problems by misidentifying a small number of legal workers as undocumented, imposing high costs and regulatory burdens on companies, and a Black market in document forgery and forgery fueled identity theft.
In interviews, Mexican immigrant students and activists, some of whom were undocumented, recalled living in fear of authorities, rarely leaving their homes and wary of raids during Ms. Haley’s two terms in office.
Erika Hernandez Perez, 26, a DACA scholarship recipient who was enrolled in cosmetology courses, said her career dreams were dashed when she was denied her license in 2015 because South Carolina, under Ms. Haley, was among the states that held out for full recognition of the DACA program.
She ended up working for her parents’ food truck and saved enough money to open her own restaurant in Greenville, serving her native Oaxacan cuisine.
“I understand her stance on illegal immigration because, as she said, her parents came here legally,” she said of Ms. Haley. But she added that she also wished Ms. Haley had more compassion for young immigrants whose parents were neither rich nor well-educated.
Diana Mesa, 21, who attended middle school in 2011, remembers the tension in her small Latino community in Spartanburg, South Carolina, during the raid. 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 relatives did not and they often had to look after each other, she said.
“It was really a preview of what was to come under Mr. Trump,” she recalled.
Susan C. Beachy contributed to the research. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
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2024-02-14 03:30:43
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