‘The Utah Way’: Conservative, Deep Red State ‘Most Welcoming’ for Illegal Immigrants

Driver ‘privilege’ licenses, ID cards, medical insurance for children, in-state college tuition and financial aid, swift occupational licensing, no 72-hour holds for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and a process to deflate some felonies into misdemeanors to delay deportation for illegal immigrants.

Progressive California? Liberal New York? Democrat-dominated Illinois?

No. Conservative Utah, where the Republican-dominated state legislature has assembled over the years an array of assistance programs for “eligible undocumented residents,” including DACA recipients, that rival those offered by sanctuary states.

That, he said, it is the “Utah Way,” to “welcome illegal aliens with open arms while denying it is offering sanctuary to them,” calling Utah a “stealth sanctuary state.”

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As a result, he wrote to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Director for Enforcement Francisco Madrigal that an “exceptional number of foreign nationals” were being released “back into the community to reside alongside Utah residents.”

Between Oct. 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023, he said, his office arrested 4,216 foreign nationals but only 1,396 were detained in Utah jails beyond 72 hours, resulting in 67 percent being released, he said.

“Word of mouth amongst migrants is Utah is a location where they will likely not be deported. The field office is also observing migrants who recently crossed the border and are relocating from sanctuary states like New York and Illinois to Utah due to the lessened risk for deportation,” Mr. Bernacke wrote.

Since Utah has similar polices as sanctuary states “such as Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington,” with sheriffs now enacting “non-detention policies,” Mr. Bernacke concluded, “I am designating the state of Utah as a sanctuary state.”

Utah sheriffs and state officials didn’t respond for four months.

“The border crisis, and consequent increase in ICE detainees, represents a federal failure, not a state or local failure. Utah’s cities and local law enforcement officials are under no obligation to serve as a backstop for longtime immigration failures at the federal level,” they wrote.

Illegal Immigration Top 2024 Issue

Republicans running for Utah’s four congressional seats, the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and challenging Gov. Cox in the June 25 primaries cite illegal immigration as the top 2024 issue, blaming the Biden administration’s “open border” policies for inducing an “invasion” by illegal aliens.

“The solution, obviously, is to close the border, to build the wall, and work on legal immigration in a serious way,” said Mr. Wilson, who is among 11 candidates in Utah’s U.S. Senate GOP primary.

“Illegal immigration is costing Americans $1,000 to $2,000 a year each by the time you look at local state and federal expenditures,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s a real strain on our criminal justice system, on our social service programs, on our schools, on our health care system.

“We’re seeing that in Utah,” Mr. Wilson continued, “and people are angry they’re being asked to pay for this and deal with the consequences of Biden’s reckless behavior in terms of opening up the border.”

Not everyone agrees Utah’s illegal immigration issues are exclusively a federal failure.

Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs told The Epoch Times that Mr. Bernacke was merely acknowledging what everyone from the border south to the Darien Gap and beyond know: Utah is a sanctuary state in all but name.

Mr. Bernacke was “describing it as such on a de facto basis because of our immigration policies,” he said.

Mr. Staggs drew the ire of the sheriffs’ association and state officials when he issued a statement after meeting with ICE in October that said the Biden administration is responsible for the border crisis, but Utah’s Republican leadership shares culpability for illegal immigrant issues within its state lines.

According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), as of September 2022, an estimated 137,000 illegal immigrants were living in Utah, including nearly 50,000 children. More than 54,000 students were enrolled in the state’s public education system, from K-12 through college.

Including $503.7 million in education costs, illegal immigration costs Utah taxpayers $931 million a year, FAIR calculated.

“Utah now ranks with the Democrat states of Washington, New York, Illinois, and California as sanctuary states that mock the rule of law. This will not end well if not promptly course-corrected,” Mr. Staggs said in October. “I call upon Gov. Spencer Cox, Senate President Stuart Adams, and House Speaker Brad Wilson to lay aside agendas and consider the consequences of continuing down this path.”

The statement drew heat—especially since Mr. Staggs was among the first to announce he was running for Mr. Romney’s U.S. Senate seat in the GOP primary, a race that now includes U.S. Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), Reagan and Bush administration attorney Brent Orrin Hatch, and Mr. Wilson.

“We see [Staggs’s] press release as nothing more than an uninformed attempt to score cheap political points,” the Utah Sheriffs Association said, expressing “extreme disappointment” in Mr. Staggs “for his naïve and uninformed press release in support of ICE’s liberal agenda that blames state leaders for ICE’s failures. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Mayors Say State Shares Blame

Mr. Staggs, however, isn’t backing down.

In March he told The Epoch Times, “I understand why county sheriffs and counties would be reticent” to sign “a very onerous agreement” with ICE.

His October statement was an appeal “to Gov. Cox, Speaker Wilson—who is now one of the people in this race—and to our Senate president, ‘Please do something. Be like Texas. Step up. Help shield these counties and county sheriffs from all the burden with respect to illegal immigration.’”

“It’s not a coincidence that Utah is the only Republican state in the nation that gives driver licenses and in-state tuition to illegal aliens,” said Chris Herrod, who served in the Utah House from 2007 to 2012 and is among 10 candidates vying in the Congressional District 3 GOP primary for Mr. Curtis’s seat.

“The No. 1 issue is illegal immigration,” he told The Epoch Times, “and everybody who is running has a weak record. Mitt Romney has a stronger record than anyone else” running for federal office.

Mr. Herrod said that when he served in the legislature, “I was known as the ‘immigration guy’ and called racist because I believe the law should be followed. We know in the ‘woke culture,’ everybody gets called that,” but most flak aimed at him came from Republicans.

“The invasion is very much happening at the border—and in our second grade classrooms,” said Republican state Rep. Phil Lyman, who is challenging Gov. Cox in the Republican gubernatorial primary along with former Utah GOP Committee chair Carson Jorgensen.

“God bless Texas for standing up. States have a responsibility to do that,” Mr. Lyman said, adding that Utah has not done so.

Roosevelt Mayor J.R. Bird—who, along with Mr. Herrod, Republican state Sen. Mike Kennedy, and Utah Young Republicans Chair Zac Wilson, is in the CD 3 primary—said he sees “directly how our immigration policies negatively impact our state and [imposes] a burden on our infrastructure, on our police force, and on our sheriff’s departments. And it’s a burden overall on our budget” even though his small Uintah Basin town doesn’t “see it like some of the larger cities do.”

Backlog Benefits Law-Breakers

The “frustrating thing,” Mr. Bird told The Epoch Times, is that those who seek to immigrate legally are stymied in a “backlogged” system “and have been waiting years and years to get into our country.

“That is wrong,” Mr. Bird said. “We’re incentivizing the wrong group of people.”

Mr. Herrod and Mr. Wilson agreed.

“I understand immigration issues. I am the only one [in the  CD 3 race] with personal experience” in dealing with the broken legal immigration system, he said, because his wife is from Ukraine. “We had to make four separate trips to Moscow for a visa,” he said, noting the problem wasn’t with Russian authorities but in dealing with U.S. immigration bureaucracy.

“My fear about this is we are a country that has always believed in legal immigration. I think what Biden has done has set the legal immigration conversation back in a significant way because people are so frustrated with what’s happened with illegal immigration,” Mr. Wilson said.

Congress needs to do its job, he said.

“Since Biden opened up the border, [Congress] has not been as aggressive and assertive. They’ve been going along with the Biden administration on too many other things. They should have been holding his feet to the fire on the border from the very first day he became the president and opened up the border with an executive order,” Mr. Wilson said. “But I think there’s a lot of responsibility at the feet of Congress on this issue.”

Mr. Staggs said that before he met with ICE officials in October, his city of 50,000 in southwest Salt Lake Valley was seeing the impacts of federal and state immigration policies on its streets.

“We’ve seen it in terms of crime. I’ve seen migrants effectively just dropped off,” he said. “We’ve seen a huge surge at one of our high schools. I think there was some 300-plus Venezuelans now there. I mean, it’s 10 percent of the student body who are here illegally. We see the effects at our doorstep.”

But that’s not “the scary part,” Mr. Staggs said.

“The way ICE described it to me in the Salt Lake City field office was it had ‘well over 100,000 active cases’” and “does not have the manpower to just deport everybody,” he said.

With Utah sheriffs terminating agreements, ICE officials told him they cannot “detain [illegal immigrants for] more than 72 hours, even if we have information” that “they’re MS 13 gang members or committed serious crimes in the country of their origin. You know, it’s, ‘We’re kind of out of luck.’”

And while he issued his statement in the early stages of an election cycle that he is campaigning in, Mr. Staggs said he was speaking more as a mayor than a U.S. Senate candidate.

“Obviously, the Biden administration must do its job and seal the border, No. 1,” he said, but the state needs to do its job, too.

“Let’s not have so much lax policy here,” Mr. Staggs said. Utah has “really magnetized, I think, a lot of illegal immigrants. One of [ICE’s] points is that the word got out about Utah [that] they don’t deport, it’s a really nice place.”

The bill, which did not advance, was supported by Utah’s then-Gov. Gary Herbert, the Utah Farm Bureau, and the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce.

But the 2024 measure, which sponsors called “the most inclusive state tuition policy in the nation,” makes special immigrant visa recipients, individuals granted humanitarian parole, and “general newcomers” also eligible.

In January 2024, Utah lawmakers agreed to provide medical insurance covering up to 2,000 children, regardless of immigration status, as part of a $4.5 million program that bases premiums on income and generally cost less than $300 a year.

Without insurance, proponents maintain, illegal immigrant children are forced to get primary care in emergency rooms with taxpayers often footing the bill.

Utah and other states that offer such coverage for illegal immigrant children are among the reasons why illegal immigrant children are in the country in the first place, the Heritage Foundation said in criticizing both bills.

It predicted that “states will regret expanding coverage to immigrants lacking permanent legal residency because of the cost” and cited unfolding events in Illinois, which paused its program because of mounting costs.

There’s nothing new about any of this, Dr. Mortensen wrote in his October Center for Immigration Studies column.

“All of this has resulted in Utah becoming a destination of choice for individuals unlawfully in the United States,” Dr. Mortensen said, adding ICE’s designation of Utah as a sanctuary state was “no surprise.”

“If border cities and states were to very publicly transport illegal aliens to Utah, it would expose the ‘Utah Way’ on illegal immigration for what it actually is—a stealth sanctuary state program,” he said.

But then again, Dr. Mortensen concluded, “If they were to do it quietly, without fanfare, that would be fully consistent with the ‘Utah Way’ and Utah could continue to welcome illegal aliens with open arms while still denying it is a sanctuary state.”