When President Trump kicked off his campaign almost two years ago by declaring that Mexico was sending unwanted criminals and rapists across the border, Valeska Castaneda brushed it off, laughing at the man she compared to a movie villain who clearly didn’t understand her Latino community.

But now that Trump is using a purported connection between crime and illegal immigration as a basis for policy — like the border wall he ordered built and a crackdown on sanctuary cities — Castaneda and other immigrants are alarmed and shaken.

“To say that immigrants are inherently criminal — how are we able to still navigate and produce such fruitful lives?” said Castaneda, a 29-year-old East Bay resident whose mother, seeking political asylum, carried her from Nicaragua to Texas when she was a year old. “Wanting something more, what’s criminal about that?”

Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles, said Trump’s use of the slogan “Make America safe again” in his inaugural address, even though overall crime rates have fallen in recent decades, made clear the president would “repeatedly use crime and the fear of crime to create exclusionary and restrictive policies.”

Amid a flurry of early immigration orders — including a temporary ban on U.S. entry for refugees and people from seven majority-Muslim countries, which was also predicated on a fear of violent crime — Trump instructed the Department of Homeland Security to “make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens” on a weekly basis.

The move appeared to be an effort to illustrate the danger created by sanctuary cities like San Francisco whose law enforcement officials refuse to turn people over to federal immigration agents for deportation.

There are deep disagreements over San Francisco’s practice, which came under attack after the July 2015 killing of Kathryn Steinle on the Embarcadero, allegedly by a Mexican immigrant who had been freed from a local jail even though the federal government wanted to deport him for a sixth time.

Back to Gallery Immigrants alarmed as Trump uses crime fears to push policy 4 1 of 4 Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 2 of 4 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 3 of 4 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 4 of 4 Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle







“The sanctuary city notion ... really just paints over the fact that you’re shielding illegal immigrants, people who have broken the law,” said Paul Forrest, a retiree who worked for Chevron in San Ramon and closely followed the case. “Out of all these arguments, an innocent person like Kate Steinle is killed.”

Trump, however, has suggested that all immigrants in the country illegally bring an elevated danger — not just those who are convicted of crimes. The executive order he signed states, “Many aliens who illegally enter the United States and those who overstay or otherwise violate the terms of their visas present a significant threat to national security and public safety.”

But many criminologists say the notion that immigrants who are in the country illegally are more likely to break the law is a disproved myth.

Although the federal government does not track people’s citizenship status when assembling crime data, studies over the last few decades have concluded there is either no correlation between immigration and crime, or a negative relationship — meaning that as a city’s immigrant population increases, violent crime and property crime tend to decrease.

In California, men between the ages of 18 and 40 born in the United States have an institutionalization rate — which factors in jails, prisons and halfway houses — 10 times higher than that of foreign-born men, according to a 2008 report from the Public Policy Institute of California.

Other research notes that as a wave of immigration peaked in the 1990s, with most people entering from Mexico, the national homicide rate plunged.

But Trump has highlighted individual cases of violence, appearing with so-called Angel Moms, women who have had a relative killed by a person who was in the country illegally. The president has also often cited the killing of Steinle in San Francisco.

Patricia Solis, 32, whose family emigrated from El Salvador, said she found the whole discussion disappointing. On a smoke break outside her mother’s clothing shop in Oakland’s heavily Latino Fruitvale neighborhood, where she works, she gestured around the city to make a point about Trump.

“We all learned to get along in one way or another here. We’ve gotten used to seeing different kinds of people and different kinds of cultures, but he’s dividing all that,” she said. “It’s just sad he thinks that us Latinos are criminals.”

Ricky Rivera, a 39-year-old Oakland resident and fifth-generation immigrant from Mexico, had a different perspective. He said people who come to the country illegally ought to be held to a higher standard. Rivera said he is in favor of the weekly crime listing ordered by Trump, so long as it includes all “aliens,” not just those from Latin America.

“I’m a tax-paying American citizen, so I feel like I have a right to commit crimes in my country,” Rivera said. “But I feel like non-Americans, non-citizens shouldn’t be allowed to come here and commit crimes. They should be happy to be here and happy to send money home to their families.”

In the Bay Area, many lawmakers and immigrant advocates are outraged by Trump’s call for a weekly log of crime by immigrants who are in the country illegally, seeing it as an effort to exploit irrational fear that will further skew perceptions of immigrants.

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi described it as a “scare tactic — an attempt to villainize.” Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom called for the list to be countered with frequent reminders of “objective truths” about immigration that Trump “has no interest in promoting.”

“His entire purpose is to scare people,” Newsom said. “Sanctuary is not about harboring criminals, period, full stop.”

Newsom and others argue that sanctuary policies boost public safety, allowing people in the country illegally to cooperate with law enforcement, whether they are crime victims or witnesses.

Jose Maciel, a 25-year-old Oakland resident whose parents brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a month old, said he hadn’t heard about the list, but laughed after hearing an explanation of Trump’s order.

“He really said that?” Maciel said. “I mean, I understand if you want to make a place better and reduce crime, but it’s not the way to do it. If Trump (knew) my father and my family, he wouldn’t be saying that stupidity.”

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov