Santa Barbara Supoervisors attempt to clarify relationship between ICE and the sheriff at Sept. 22 hearing

It was a long, hot hearing before the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors on Sept. 22. Sheriff Bill Brown and officer David Marin of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), along with a small army of concerned residents, packed into the government center on Betteravia Road to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the Sheriff’s Office and ICE.

The hearing, called by Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, was in response to a murder in which one of the accused is an undocumented resident who had recently been released from the Santa Barbara County Jail despite a detainer from ICE. 

The air conditioning at the hearing was lackluster, and the core issue—immigration detainers and custody transfer between ICE and the sheriff—was a hot one. Brown and Marin tried to explain the process and address some common misconceptions among the attendees. The condensed version: ICE has limited resources and thus doesn’t have staff at the Santa Barbara County Jail 24/7—the organization is more focused on counties, like LA, that have bigger jails with many more arrests, according to Marin. When ICE staff does visit the Santa Barbara County Jail, they conduct interviews and look at arrest records of the foreign-born inmates held there, he said.

If someone has a criminal record, ICE may issue a detainer. That’s a message to the sheriff that they’d like to be at the jail to assume custody when that person is released. Under the current state of the law, however, the sheriff can’t hold someone past their release date. And release dates come for all sorts of reasons: because someone serves their full sentence, or a case is dropped, or somebody puts up bail in the middle of the night, according to Brown.

The former circumstance—a sentence served—is a relatively easy situation in which to coordinate a custody transfer with ICE. The latter—bail, a dropped case, cite and release, whatever it may be—are much harder to predict. And if ICE isn’t there when the person is released, detainer or no detainer, then they can’t assume custody of the individual, Brown and Marin explained.

California’s 2013 Trust Act spells out, in detail, when local law enforcement should cooperate with ICE detainers. And a court case from 2014, Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas County, says that holding someone based only on an ICE detainer may violate their individual rights and that state or local agencies could be held accountable for such a violation.

A few questions remained open: How many undocumented individuals pass through the jail, for example. The sheriff doesn’t have a mechanism for determining someone’s immigration status, Brown said, so they don’t know how many folks coming through the jail are undocumented.

“Unless ICE puts out a detainer, that’s really our only indicator,” he said. What the sheriff does know: 14 percent of the jail’s inmates are foreign born, although many of those foreign-born could also be legal residents or U.S. citizens, according to Brown.

When Supervisor Peter Adam asked Marin how many people are released despite detainers, Marin said that he couldn’t guesstimate. 

“Are more released despite detainers than those successfully transferred?” Adam asked. 

“That’s hard to say, sir,” Marin answered.

Adam wasn’t satisfied: “You have absolutely no estimate?” He frowned through his moustache. “I find that a little hard to swallow. But if that’s what it is, that’s what it is.”

For an hour or so, the meeting was a measured, technocratic back-and-forth between the supervisors, the sheriff, and ICE over the particulars of immigration detainers and custody transfers. 

Then, the public comment period opened up, and the rhetoric of the meeting quickly sprawled. Santa Maria Mayor Alice Patino thought the occasion appropriate to denounce Proposition 47—the ballot measure by which various nonviolent drug felonies were retroactively reduced to misdemeanors and a slew of sentences reduced. “We now have these criminals released on our street, and it’s raising havoc,” she declared. “Removing criminals from our street is extremely important.”

A couple of speakers pointed out that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the incarceration for foreign-born adults—who make up about a third of California’s population—is 297 per 100,000. For adults born in the U.S., the incarceration rate is 813 per 100,000. 

Cities with high immigration rates, the Institute says, have “no discernible link or a slightly negative one” with high crime rates. A study of cities in California found no relationship between immigrant inflows and property crime; with violent crime, there was a negative relationship.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about this in July of this year. It quoted a report by the Immigration Policy Center. The crux of that report is that the undocumented population grew threefold between 1990 and 2013. During that period, violent crimes declined by 48 percent and property crimes by 41 percent.

Several members of the Latino community came out to speak at the supervisors’ meeting, as well. They told stories of checkpoints, arrests, ICE vans and deportations; ICE and the sheriff, correcting the record, often contradicted them directly. 

Those numbers were not on the mind of Michael Riviera, who previously bumped into the Sun while protesting outside the courthouse on Aug. 13. He predicted “unbelievable mayhem” without action against illegal immigration. To stave off that mayhem, Riviera demanded the implementation of E-Verify to track biometric data for everyone, documented or undocumented, employed in the county. 

Tea Party activist Matt Kokkonen warned the board that Iran was routing thousands of their agents through Central America and America’s porous southern border. These Iranian actors, Kokkonen speculated, would secretly spread Islamic Sharia law in the United States. “We need to watch out for this,” he admonished.

One speaker told the story of an ICE van striking fear into their neighborhood and leaving fliers on people’s cars. “There was no van,” Marin said, “and our vehicles are unmarked—you wouldn’t be able to tell anyways.”

Luis Bañera told the board that fear of deportation affected the children of his community. “Kids see police and they worry for their parents,” he said in Spanish. “They think—‘The police have come for my father.’ It affects them emotionally and mentally.”

Marin clarified ICE’s enforcement priorities, responding: “Criminals, sir, those are our targets. Those who have been convicted of a crime.” 

Olga Santos took the stand, her voice steady at first, and told a different story. “They are also detaining people who are not committing crimes,” she insisted. Overcome, she began to cry: “Anybody who has children will understand—if you are a parent and you have to get back to work and you have to tell your child, ‘Mija—I love you—I don’t know if I’ll be back … .’”

Staff Writer Sean McNulty can be reached at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in Oct 1-8, 2015.