Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have spent weeks branding Nikki Haley a bleeding heart on immigration as he seeks to field her as his last remaining challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination.
In Mr. Trump’s words, Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a “globalist” who pledged her support for Mr. Trump’s hard-line policies before serving as his ambassador to the United Nations. Ahead of a showdown between the two candidates in South Carolina’s Feb. 24 primary, surrogates have accused her of being a secret liberal who supports open borders and won’t do enough to stem the flow of immigrants and refugees into the nation.
But it’s a portrait almost unrecognizable to many who knew her as governor: the state’s Republican lawmakers who banked on her support for immigration restrictions. the longtime immigrant rights activists in South Carolina who fought her for the legislation. conservative religious leaders who were frustrated with her opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to settle in the state. Mr. Trump’s attacks were complicated by her record as a staunch conservative on the issue, they said, even as she continued to support legal immigration when her party shifted its focus to more extreme immigration cuts.
Larry Grooms, a South Carolina state senator who in 2011 helped pass the immigration restrictions that Ms. Haley is now pushing on the trail, said it was disappointing to hear fellow Republicans who were in the trenches with him on that law now join to 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 it hadn’t been for Nikki Haley rolling up her sleeves and pushing the ball, it wouldn’t have passed,” he said, calling the distortions of her record wrong. and “unfair”. He has endorsed Ms. Haley.
Since entering politics in 2004, Ms. Haley has held views on immigration that have remained largely consistent, according to a review of past statements, the legislative record and interviews with both supporters and critics. He has long advocated improving legal routes to the United States while aggressively reducing illegal ones. And she often frames her beliefs in her own ancestry.
“I am the proud daughter of legal immigrants — emphasis on legal“, she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “It’s Not an Option.” Her parents, she wrote, left affluent lives in India before eventually immigrating to Canada and the United States, though she and her staff declined to elaborate.
As a state legislator in 2008, Ms. Haley sponsored legislation that made South Carolina the first state to expressly bar undocumented students from enrolling in public colleges and universities. But it was the tough immigration measures he signed in 2011 that propelled South Carolina into the national spotlight. At the time, a faction of the conservative Tea Party movement that helped fuel its own rise in politics was fueling a broader wave of crackdowns across the Sun Belt, just as states in the Deep South were seeing a surge in their small Latino populations.
South Carolina’s measures, which were modeled after Arizona’s tough “show-me-your-papers” law and went almost as far, drew a lawsuit from the Obama administration while fueling concerns that it would encourage racial and ethnic profiling of Latinos . It also banned occupational licenses for undocumented immigrants, barring even those who attended private or out-of-state colleges from certain in-state occupations.
Mr. Grooms said Ms. Haley helped get members of her party in line in the final push to get it through. Tom Davis, a Republican senator in South Carolina who supports Ms. Haley’s presidential bid, pointed to her stamp of approval on the bill as an example that Mr. 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 has been caught up in her party’s shifting headwinds on immigration as reform deals crumbled in Congress and her party’s immigration hawks moved further to the right.
In 2015, Ms. Haley faced a backlash from local Republicans for supporting efforts by religious groups to resettle people in South Carolina. She eventually took an aggressive stance against resettling Syrians in her state after the terrorist attacks in Paris that same year, citing gaps in information that could complicate the vetting process.
The following year, Ms. Haley delivered the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address. She urged against following “the siren call of the angriest voices” and extended a hand of welcome to immigrants who follow the rules – a move many of her Republican critics still see as a rebuke of Mr Trump’s demonizing rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Lee Bright, a former state senator who is unaligned in the 2024 race, argued that Ms. Haley was more conservative on the issue when she entered the state House but seemed to become more liberal over time. During the Syrian refugee debate, he recalled, he was said to have condemned the prospect of a bill that would hold aid organizations responsible for violent acts committed in the US by anyone they supported.
Now, he argues, Ms. Haley is getting more credit than she deserves for hardline legislation written by Republican state lawmakers.
“President Trump is absolutely right,” he said, “it’s a flip flop.”
Campaigning in her home state, Ms. Haley is fighting back more forcefully against attacks on her record, though she faces an uphill battle. Mr. Trump, who continues to dominate South Carolina polls by double digits, has more than 80 current and former state Republican officials supporting his campaign, including Governor Henry McMaster and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.
In recent days, he argued that as he signed the 2011 legislation, Mr Trump was “still a New York liberal” who donated to Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris. She called him “irresponsible” for his recent interference with a Republican-led immigration deal in Congress, delaying progress as the border crisis grows.
She continues to voice her support for renewing legal immigration pathways, based on business needs and merits, and strengthening the asylum system that she says protects persecuted people like the Afghan interpreters who helped her husband, Maj. Michael Haley, while abroad. But her positions on illegal immigration are in line with her party’s new conservative edge under Mr. Trump: She has voiced support for deploying the military against Mexican drug cartels, limiting citizenship and sending millions of immigrants back to their homelands. their countries of origin.
He supports the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which grants work permits and temporary legal status to 570,000 people who were brought to the United States as children. But he calls it a “carrot” 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 South Carolina’s restrictions put in place in 2011 is difficult to quantify. Federal courts struck down some aspects, including provisions that required law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of certain people at routine stops and that immigrants carry federal registration documents. However, a part of the law requiring illegal immigrants to be transferred from the state to federal custody was upheld.
The main provision that remains untouched to this day requires businesses to verify that their workers are in the country legally. But a 2018 study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that it was in serious trouble because it misidentified a small number of legal workers as undocumented, imposed expensive costs and regulatory burdens on businesses, and fueled a black market for document forgery and theft identity.
In interviews, Mexican immigrant students and activists, some undocumented, recalled living in fear of the authorities, rarely leaving their homes and being on alert for raids during Ms. Haley’s two terms.
Erika Hernandez Perez, 26, a DACA recipient enrolled in cosmetology classes, said her career dreams were crushed when she was barred from obtaining her license in 2015 as South Carolina, under Ms. Haley, fell among states who endured the fully recognizing the DACA program..
She ended up going to work at her parents’ food truck and saving enough money to open her own restaurant in Greenville serving her native Oaxacan food.
“I understand her stance on illegal immigration because, as she has said in the past, her parents came here legally,” he said of Ms. Haley. But he added that he 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, SC, amid the crackdown. She had been born in Guanajuato, Mexico and moved to South Carolina as a child after her father secured a job at a BMW factory. Although she and her parents had legal status, other relatives did not, and they often had to watch out for each other, she said.
“It was really a preview,” he recalls, of what was to come under Mr. Trump.
Susan C. Beachy contributed to the research. The sound is produced by Parin Behrooz.
