Surprise findings for Santa Clara, Alameda counties regarding ICE requests to detain immigrants

Santa Clara County makes the list, but the county containing Austin is at the top because of newly adopted policy.


Foreign nationals are arrested in February during a targeted
enforcement aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and
at-large criminal aliens in Los Angeles. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement released a report on Monday on counties that are
not complying with requests to detain undocumented immigrants.


March 21, 2017 at 3:20 pm | UPDATED: March 21, 2017 at 6:17 pm

Over one week this year, local officials across the country released more than 200 illegal immigrant offenders and suspects from jails, according to a new federal report aimed at calling out agencies that refuse to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But while law enforcement officials in liberal California have openly pushed back against the Trump administration’s illegal immigration crackdown, it was a county deep in the heart of conservative Texas that led the list with 142 declined “detainer” requests from Jan. 28 to Feb. 3.

Santa Clara County — which according to an earlier report had led the nation in rejecting ICE requests — had exactly one case listed in the report released Monday: a Mexican national with a domestic violence conviction.

Alameda County too had one case: a Cambodian also with a domestic violence conviction. Los Angeles agencies led the list for California with five cases involving domestic violence, assault and arson. Santa Barbara, Sacramento and Madera counties each had one case, as did the city of Anaheim. The list cited no cases in San Francisco.

ICE officials said the report will be updated weekly and will identify “the jurisdictions that have declined to honor ICE detainers or requests for notification and includes examples of criminal charges associated with those released aliens.”

“When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect the public safety and carry out it’s mission,” said acting ICE director Thomas Homan in a statement.

Donald Trump made cracking down on illegal immigration a cornerstone of his presidential campaign last year. Among cases he cited was that of Kate Steinle, who was fatally shot in San Francisco on July 1, 2015, allegedly by a Mexican national in the country illegally whom San Francisco authorities had released from jail.

ICE cited an executive order from President Donald Trump that requires it to be make the information public in order “to highlight jurisdictions that choose not to cooperate with ICE detainers or requests for notification, therefore potentially endangering Americans.”

The alleged offenses and convictions of the 206 cases cited in the report ranged from marijuana possession and drunken driving to armed assault, rape and child molestation.

While Texas’ Travis County led the nation with 142 of the total 206 ICE detainer requests declined, officials in that county, which includes the politically liberal city of Austin, attributed the numbers to implementation of a new policy toward ICE detainers.

The ICE report said that policy, implemented in January, calls for accepting ICE requests accompanied by a court order, and in cases involving murder, aggravated sexual assault and human smuggling.

“This first weekly report that ICE has decided to initiate falls during the period in which we implemented our new policy,” Major Wes Priddy with the Travis County Sheriff’s Office told a local NPR radio station. “We applied the new policy to all those we had in custody, and it wasn’t just on detainers received during that week.”

In 2011, Santa Clara County became one of the nation’s first sanctuary communities when it opted to refuse to hold any inmates unless ICE paid for the cost of detaining them — which the agency will not do. Three years later, the board shot down a proposal to hold “the worst of the worst” inmates 24 hours past their release date, but it was altered after Steinle’s death in 2015 to allow ICE agents to be notified about the impending release of an offender who had committed a violent or serious crime in the past.

Many other counties, including Alameda, have also instituted noncompliance policies on immigration detainers, although critics there and in Contra Costa County have recently held protests over release notifications that resulted in inmates landing in ICE custody.

In a tweet reacting to the report, Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez said the county is already fighting back, referring to the lawsuit filed last month challenging Trump’s threat to defund counties that don’t comply with his immigration enforcement plan. Chavez is traveling to New York next week to take part in “Seeking Sanctuary: Municipal Policy to Confront Mass Deportation and Criminalization,” a conference with other municipal leaders. She called the Trump administration crackdown needlessly divisive.

“This is not thoughtful, comprehensive immigration reform,” Chavez said. “This is trying to get one half of the population to pick up pitchforks against the other, and I don’t want to live in a pitchfork democracy.”

In a past report acquired by the Texas Tribune and disseminated by the Center for Immigration Studies, Santa Clara County led the nation for detention requests denied for the period of Jan. 1, 2014, through Sept. 30, 2015. It had 1,856 total declined detainers for that period, with 964 for people with a prior criminal record. The next highest county was Los Angeles, with 1,492 total declined detainers, 1,290 with prior record.

While ICE officials did not dispute that report, which the newspaper attributed to ICE data provided on request, they added that many factors could be at play. For example, a county with a newly adopted policy against compliance — such as Travis in the recent report — might have greater numbers than those of an agency known not to comply that didn’t get many requests.

But according to the report released Monday, those statistics will soon present a more accurate picture of where the most detainers are declined.

“ICE field offices have been instructed to resume issuing detainers on all removable aliens in custody regardless of prior noncooperation,” it states. “As a result, the number of issued detainers will increase over the next several reporting periods.”

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/2...ng-immigrants/