SACRAMENTO — The day after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill aimed at preventing local police from helping the Trump administration crack down on illegal immigration, the feds struck back with a threat to raid more workplaces and neighborhoods in California.

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Echoing arguments that opponents have made since it was introduced late last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Tom Homan released a statement Friday saying that Senate Bill 54, the “sanctuary state” legislation, would “undermine public safety” and force his agency to have a greater presence in places where immigrants live and work.

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Opinion: Christians must fight Trump attempt to monopolize faith “ICE will have no choice but to conduct at-large arrests in local neighborhoods and at worksites,” Homan said, “which will inevitably result in additional collateral arrests.” This will happen, he claimed, because the new California law will block ICE agents from gaining access to criminal immigrants at jails and prisons.

“Collateral arrests” are a controversial practice in which ICE, while attempting to apprehend an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record, sweeps up other undocumented residents such as family or co-workers at the same location.

Homan’s statement was immediately blasted by the author of SB 54, Senate Pro Tem Kevin de León, as more “fear-mongering” by the Trump administration, but it raised serious questions about whether it signaled a shift in ICE tactics — and what such a shift might look like.

“You might do this as an example to other states: ‘Instead of pulling people out of jail cells, we’re going to be pulling people out of school drop-off lines,'” said Thad Kousser, a professor of California politics at UC San Diego. “That’s a possible strategy — and clearly one that really just ratchets up this war between California and the federal government.”

Bill Whalen, a longtime GOP strategist who is now a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said state and federal laws — such as marijuana legislation — often conflict. “The question is how far can the state of California push the Trump administration,” he said, “because to be honest, SB 54 is an openly defiant act.”

But Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a veteran political analyst at the University of Southern California, said she saw Homan’s statement as “unnecessarily thuggish.”

“If you want people to understand what you’re doing, you explain to them not only what you’re doing but why you’re doing it,” she said. “They had to have made a decision to use that rhetoric and only that rhetoric.”

At least one part of Homan’s statement is clearly inaccurate because state prisons were excluded from the final version of SB 54, so ICE agents are still free to enter prisons at will. The law also allows federal agents to interview detainees in county jails, though not to hold permanent office space, and to access databases showing an inmate’s release date.

The new law will also permit local law enforcement officers to communicate with federal agents about detainees with felony convictions in the past 15 years as well as those awaiting trial for serious felonies for which a judge has found probable cause — and to coordinate transfers of those people into federal custody.

De León, D-Los Angeles, rebutted Homan’s statement with a release of his own.

“The Trump administration is once again making heavy-handed threats against California because we won’t help them tear apart families and our economy in the process,” he said. “The acting ICE director’s inaccurate statement exemplifies the fear-mongering and lies that guide this administration.”

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A spokesman for Brown pointed to a statement the governor released as he signed the bill: “This bill does not prevent or prohibit Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security from doing their own work in any way,” Brown wrote. “They are free to use their own considerable resources to enforce federal immigration law in California.”

In anticipation of stepped-up raids, lawmakers passed a collection of other bills aimed at resisting Trump’s immigration agenda. Brown signed 10 into law on Thursday, and they will take effect Jan. 1.

Assembly Bill 450, by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, forbids employers from sharing personal information with federal agents about employees or granting immigration officers access to workplaces without proper court orders. Assembly Bill 291, also by Chiu, will make it illegal for landlords to use someone’s real or perceived immigration status against them.

Homan’s statement showed that ICE’s objectives are “punitive and political,” said Salvador Sarmiento, an organizer with the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “With every new threat and every new raid, ICE is showing itself to be the conduit for a blatantly racist deportation agenda.

“No one at this point believes that ICE is remotely interested in public safety — and ironically their threats only make more clear the need for localities and states to enact better policies to uphold the law,” Sarmiento said. “ICE has one major weapon, as does Trump, and that’s fear. And this statement goes along with their mission to make immigrants afraid of their government and to continue to make U.S. citizens afraid of immigrants.”