In 2020, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office released 12 undocumented immigrants into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
“From 2019 to 2020, the number of ICE requests decreased substantially, and the number of ICE rearrests also decreased substantially,” Sheriff Bill Brown told the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors during a June 22 Truth (Transparent Review of Unjust Transfers and Holds) Act forum.
The Truth Act, which became law in 2017, requires local legislative bodies to host a community forum once a year if local law enforcement allows ICE access to any individual in their custody. In 2018, the Values Act modified some provisions in the Truth Act and restricted the ways in which law enforcement agencies in California can collaborate with ICE. Local law enforcement can choose to notify ICE or Border Patrol of a release if a criminal is convicted of most felonies and some higher-level misdemeanors.
ICE requested information for 132 Santa Barbara County Jail inmates in 2020, down from 448 in 2019. The Sheriff’s Office collaborated with ICE on 43 of those inmates in 2020 and ICE arrested 12 of them. ICE picked up 38 in 2019.
Brown said those picked up in 2020 were convicted of felony or higher-misdemeanor crimes, including spousal battery, drug possession, and sex with a minor. Several had been arrested multiple times.
“They’re all for serious crimes of some sort,” Brown said during his presentation. “We’re on track this year for perhaps even fewer numbers.”
Immigrant advocates who spoke during public comment at the meeting said that the Sheriff’s Office shouldn’t collaborate with ICE at all and asked for the Board of Supervisors to support the Vision Act, which recently passed the state Assembly. The legislation would bar local law enforcement agencies from working with ICE.
They compared the collaboration process to a two-tiered system where undocumented immigrants who serve the time allotted to their convictions get rearrested upon their release from jail.
“People who commit crimes should be held accountable for their crimes, but when sheriffs act as deportation agents it undermines trust and confidence in all law enforcement, making our communities and families feel less safe,” Pam Gates said over Zoom. “Like all people, an immigrant who is released from jail should be able to restart their life with their families and in their communities rather than face the threat of deportation.”
Mario Espinoza-Kulik, who is a health policy research scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and teaches ethnic studies and gender and queer studies at Cal Poly, said that immigration enforcement activities create a major barrier to public health care. A Central Coast health equity survey completed by the La Gente Unida project found that nearly 1 in 5 Spanish-speaking respondents had avoided health care in the last three months because of their documentation status.
Local law enforcement agencies working hand-in-hand with ICE to deport undocumented immigrants erodes trust in public entities and creates fear within the community, advocates said. Instead of eroding trust, the Sheriff’s Office should implement policies to build up trust with the community.
“We do not enforce immigration law,” Sheriff Brown said in response to public comments. “To the extent that we notify ICE at their request of the release of a suspect who is wanted by the federal authorities, it is all done through the parameters of the existing law.”
Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino said that the report presented by the sheriff showed a different picture than what some of the public speakers brought up.
“We’ve now honed this thing down to 12 individuals that quite frankly no one should be defending,” he said. “It’s not pro-immigrant to advocate for these people to go back into the community. … I’m not judging the immigrant community by these 12 people by any stretch because every group has these 12 people in it; it’s just a fact of life.”
Lavagnino asked the sheriff if they had access to ICE arrests that happened outside the bounds of collaboration with local law enforcement. Brown replied that he didn’t. People who commit minor offenses aren’t the ones who end up transferred from Sheriff’s Office custody to ICE, Lavagnino said.
“It sounds like that’s the fear from what we’re hearing in the community,” he said, adding that gaining a fuller picture of what ICE does might help bring even more transparency to what the Sheriff’s Office does and doesn’t do to collaborate with the federal agency. Lavagnino committed to trying to bring ICE in front of the Board of Supervisors for a hearing.
“We’ll try to figure out a way to get that other information because I think it’s critical that people in the community understand that at least our Sheriff’s Department is not out enforcing federal immigration policy,” he said.
This article appears in Jul 1-8, 2021.