California Democrats’ bill would let illegal immigrant professors keep teaching after deportation

AB 2019 would require community colleges to “allow its faculty who departed the United States on or after January 1, 2027, for a specified reason, including, among others, due to immigration enforcement actions” to “perform their instruction and professional duties through distance education or other remote modalities offered by the community college district.” It would also allow remote teaching “voluntarily due to the threat of immigration enforcement,” potentially helping them evade deportation.

The bill, which effectively gives illegal immigrant professors greater job security than citizen professors arrested for other alleged crimes, passed the Assembly Committee on Higher Education 7-3 on April 21.

It has been estimated that as many as 857,200 of America’s 8.1 million teachers are immigrants, almost half of whom are in higher education, though that estimate does not reveal what percentage are in the United States illegally.

The move comes amid ongoing controversy over how to handle illegal immigration. Supporters of the bill have framed it as protection against aggressive conduct of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) under President Donald Trump. But while ICE’s tactics, particularly in Minneapolis, garnered bipartisan scrutiny, prompting Trump to replace Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino with White House border czar Tom Homan and modify deportation tactics and messaging, California’s protection of illegal aliens runs far deeper.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation severely limiting law enforcement’s access to school grounds and records for immigration enforcement actions, while the California State University system (CSU) has devoted $42 million over the last five years to free legal services for illegal immigrant students, staff, and their families. Newsom’s 2025–2026 budget appropriated an additional $17.6 million for the same purpose.

Yet outside the most left-wing state in the Union, such sympathy with illegal immigration is much more of a liability. Former President Joe Biden presided over a surge of illegals entering the United States and being released inside the country after the reversal of several border policies from Trump’s first term, creating a humanitarian crisis that prompted even the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration to declare America’s southern border with Mexico the “deadliest land crossing in the world” in 2022.

While the Democratic Party has long supported open border policies, under Biden, even Democrat localities far from the border began to feel the strain, thanks in part to Texas and Florida busing and flying illegal immigrants in their custody to be housed in blue states. The crisis was one of the key issues that returned Trump to office in the 2024 election.