Jurupa Valley, Calif.
It’s 3:45 a.m., and the cars have started turning into an Ace Hardware parking lot, in a sparse commercial zone by one of the area’s many highways. The drivers park, get out, and open their trunks. They slip on bulletproof vests, holster Glock 26 pistols, and ready the batons and handcuffs.
Two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fugitive operations teams, about a dozen officers, are getting ready for a day of tracking down illegal immigrants. The targets are all in Riverside County, an hour east of Los Angeles. They are not the worst of the worst, but they are eligible for deportation because of their criminal histories: felony spousal abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, drug trafficking. Five of the subjects are Mexican; one is Lebanese.
Just after 4 a.m. on this Thursday in mid-June, as floodlights illuminate their silhouettes and cast shadows from nearby potted plants and bags of soil, the teams review the suspects and the plan of action. Standing in a circle, with some using flashlights to see the papers before them, the officers take turns discussing how each arrest will go down. Surveillance teams have already staked out residences and sought out chatty neighbors to figure out each target’s patterns. One heads off to work daily at 7:30 a.m., always stopping at a Chevron gas station near his house for coffee. Another comes home from an overnight shift every morning right at 8:40. The ICE teams prefer traffic stops, where the targets are easily controlled. They are safer. But some of today’s marks require a “knock and talk”—for officers to walk right up to the suspect’s door and ask to speak to them.
“If things go south on us and we have a medical emergency, there’s Loma Linda,” one of the leaders tells the assembled teams, referring to a university medical center 25 minutes to the east. “They have a trauma center,” he says. “Remember, this area is gang-infiltrated.”
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department has a station just a block away from where we are standing. Over the next seven hours, though, ICE officers will conduct surveillance, question and arrest people, pull over cars, and search houses entirely on their own, without the assistance of Riverside or any other local police force.
That’s the way it goes with immigration enforcement in California these days. Many of the most pressing crimes in the United States—terrorism, gangs, and drugs—are fought in tandem by federal and local law enforcement. On immigration, counties and states nationwide are increasingly backing away from what has traditionally been their part of the bargain. Some cities are calling themselves “sanctuaries” in opposition to the policies of the Trump administration, but more and more even those that don’t use the moniker are directing their police not to cooperate with ICE.
Contrary to the way they are portrayed by critics, sanctuary cities are not rogue jurisdictions brazenly flouting federal law. Instead, in an approach blessed by federal judges, they are exercising policy judgments about whether their jailers will hang onto prisoners so ICE can collect them or even communicate with ICE at all. They have decided that their residents are best served by building trust with local police and keeping immigrant families intact. With no sign of comprehensive immigration reform coming out of Washington, sanctuary cities are taking matters into their own hands and slowing down deportations.
Making federal law enforcement less efficient has consequences, though. It means fewer criminals are deported to their home countries. It places ICE officers in riskier situations, because they have to encounter criminals at their houses instead of collecting them from jails. And it distorts who stays in the country and who goes. That’s because when tracking illegal immigrants with criminal records, ICE officers often encounter that person’s relatives and friends, who’ve done nothing wrong but come to America illegally. And they often are the ones who wind up being deported instead.
THE SANCTUARY MOVEMENT
Nowhere are tensions higher than in Southern California. The area was settled by the Spanish. It belonged to Mexico until 1848. Los Angeles has long served as a magnet for people from Central and South America. Today, some 45 percent of the 19.1 million people in the greater Los Angeles area identify as Hispanic or Latino. In that same region live an estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants.
As cities are working to accommodate illegal immigrants, the Trump administration is working to deport them. This is part of a larger federal effort to highlight and combat the damage caused by illegal immigration. The most prominent aspect is Trump’s call to build a wall along the Mexican border, but his policies also include stepped-up efforts to police those who have managed to get across and live here. He has promised to crack down on sanctuary cities and to strip them of federal funding. Congress is getting in on the fight, too: In late June the House passed “Kate’s Law,” named after one of the most prominent victims of illegal-immigrant crime, to try to force sanctuary cities to become more helpful in enforcing immigration law.
The sanctuary movement traces its roots to the Cold War. In the early 1980s, civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala pitted military dictatorships backed by the Reagan administration against Marxist guerrillas supported by the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans streamed across the U.S. southern border, many illegally, in search of peace and prosperity.
A network of churches in California, Arizona, and Texas rose up to shelter the new arrivals, who were subject to round-ups by local sheriffs. These advocates saw themselves as a latter-day Underground Railroad, helping shepherd the needy to safety and support. Some felt a further kinship with the Catholic priests in Central America who followed liberation theology and bore the persecution of the dictatorships. Others drew inspiration from the Old Testament books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, which described ancient Israeli “cities of refuge” where people could flee to avoid retribution.
With its large immigrant population, Los Angeles was among the first cities in the country to lay down policies to build trust between police and undocumented migrants. Special Order 40, signed in 1979, prohibited the LAPD from stopping people “with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person.” Officers were directed not to charge people with violating U.S. immigration law, but simply to notify federal officials if an undocumented alien was being arrested for a serious misdemeanor or a felony.
In 1994, 59 percent of California voters approved Proposition 187, a measure that, among other provisions designed to discourage illegal immigration, required local law enforcement to determine if anyone arrested was in the country illegally and, if so, report them to federal immigration authorities. Activists sued and blocked implementation of the law. After years of litigation, a federal judge struck it down in 1997, declaring, “California is powerless to enact its own legislative scheme to regulate immigration.” A lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund enthused: “The judge has vindicated the principle that we can’t have 50 immigration policies, we can only have one.”
Today such activists, in the face of an administration that wants more robust enforcement, have soured on the idea that the federal government reigns supreme on immigration. There are 382 metropolitan areas in the United States, and sanctuary city advocates would have as many different policies bloom.
“A complete flip,” says Dan Lungren, a former Republican congressman from California who served as the state’s attorney general in the 1990s. “We were complaining that the federal government was not fulfilling its responsibility to pick up these people, who had committed crimes in our country. They refused to take action to pick them up and deport them.”
While some cities have had sanctuary policies for decades, the number of such cities began rising in the early years of the Obama administration. Deportations were increasing as improving technology allowed federal immigration authorities to target illegal immigrants. Cities with large immigrant populations reacted with alarm and took steps to try to reassure their residents that local police could be trusted to work with crime victims regardless of immigration status.
In the Los Angeles area, there are numerous projects underway to lend support to illegal immigrants: The city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County are chipping a combined $5 million into a legal defense fund to provide lawyers for those facing deportation proceedings. Interfaith leaders are assembling networks of “safe houses,” and activist groups are trying to teach undocumented immigrants about their rights.
Today, the federal government is eager to deport criminals. President Trump speaks regularly about the “bad hombres” and “bad dudes” who are here illegally and must be sent back to their countries. Nationally, ICE arrests are up about 40 percent this year compared with a year ago. In the Los Angeles area, though, they are flat.
FUGITIVE OPERATIONS
The ICE teams head out of the Ace Hardware parking lot a little before 5 a.m. in a caravan of unmarked American-made SUVs with tinted windows. The Los Angeles ICE office hunts for illegal immigrants like this every day. Its nine fugitive operations teams cover seven counties. ICE doesn’t like calling these activities “raids” or “sweeps,” as those terms sound as though agents are indiscriminately rounding people up. It prefers “targeted operations,” which emphasizes that these are precise efforts aimed at particular undocumented immigrants with criminal histories. In 2017, 91 percent of those arrested by ICE in the area had criminal convictions, and ICE insists that it targets only criminals.
This morning’s activities are unusual because two teams are combining efforts and have been joined by two of the L.A. office’s department heads. Seven members of the media are tagging along, and ICE wants to ensure there’s enough manpower for safety. Four journalists from the New York Times are riding in one car; a reporter and photographer from the Riverside Press-Enterprise along with your trusty correspondent are in another.
The day’s first target, or “tango” in law-enforcement jargon, is Anselmo Moran Lucero, 51, a Mexican national who was deported in 2007 after serving a six-month sentence for felony spousal abuse. He re-entered the country at some point, and in July 2014 was arrested for domestic violence in nearby Orange County, ICE told us. Those charges were dropped, and he was released.
Like many of the subjects hunted by these ICE teams, Lucero might not be on the streets at all if the local sheriff’s office had been more cooperative. The way ICE sees it, Lucero should have been re-deported in 2014, when he was arrested in Orange County. ICE flagged Lucero when the arrest went out across law-enforcement databases and says it notified the sheriff to hold Lucero until agents could arrive to take him into custody. That request is called a “detainer.” The best measure of whether a jurisdiction is a sanctuary city is not what it calls itself, but how it handles detainer requests from ICE.
FEDERAL IMMIGRATION DETAINERS
Whenever anybody is arrested anywhere in the United States, his or her fingerprints are matched against those in federal databases like the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. One is US-VISIT, which tracks foreign nationals entering or leaving the country, and which an ICE center just outside Burlington, Vt., uses to check every arrestee.
If a suspect has had any previous encounters with Border Patrol, ICE, or similar agencies, the Vermont center relays that information electronically to the arresting agency as well as to ICE’s office in the area, often in a matter of minutes. In Lucero’s case, that US-VISIT review showed he had previously been deported.
For arrests in the Los Angeles area, any US-VISIT hits arrive at ICE’s Pacific Enforcement Response Center in Laguna Niguel, about an hour south of Los Angeles. There, inside a federal building that resembles a large yellow Mayan temple, analysts process immigration information around the clock for most of California (as well as for 41 other states and the District of Columbia). Last year, the center processed about 300,000 cases that were flagged in Vermont—about one-third of the national volume. It is ICE’s largest such center in the United States. The work is cyclical. The busiest times tend to be weekends and in the summer, when more people are arrested than in the other seasons.
Working in rows of cubicles, analysts scour federal databases for any information on the person apprehended. If the subject does not raise any flags—say, if he has no prior verified border crossings or deportations—then ICE would not know his immigration status and would do nothing. If the person shows up in a database but is a U.S. citizen, then ICE would also do nothing. But if ICE determines that the prisoner is here illegally, then the center in Laguna Niguel sends a detainer request to the jail where the immigrant was processed. The detainer asks the jail to hold the prisoner for an additional 48 hours until ICE can show up, or if it won’t do that, to at least notify ICE when the release of the prisoner is pending.
From there, the onus falls on the local jail to follow up with ICE to arrange the transfer of the prisoner. Often, especially in the Los Angeles area, local law enforcement ignores the request.
Detainers aren’t binding because nothing in federal law requires them to be. The closest federal statute says that federal, state, or local governments “may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” Nothing obligates local police to hold prisoners suspected of immigration violations or even to respond to ICE requests for information. The language of the statute, which was part of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, seems to say only that local officials cannot be prohibited from communicating with ICE.
“It’s not entirely clear to me that the statute as written applies to the situation we have,” says Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law and an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute. “The cities are simply not replying to a detainer.” He says the meaning of the law has never been litigated. Even if a tougher or clearer federal law existed, Blackman says it’s uncertain if it would be constitutional because “there is a general doctrine that says the federal government can’t force local police officials to do their bidding.”
What this means is that in different places around the country, local officials handle ICE detainer requests differently. Thomas Giles, the deputy field office director in L.A., moved here from Phoenix in March and says that the biggest difference is “some of the jurisdictions don’t honor our detainers.”
In an effort to shame uncooperative jurisdictions, the Trump administration in March started publishing the names of communities that failed to honor detainer requests along with details of the crimes committed by the felons who the local police declined to hold for ICE. It halted the effort after three weeks because the first three reports were filled with errors.
THE LEGAL LIABILITY
There are several reasons why police might release a prisoner sought by ICE: local laws or policies, fear of lawsuits, and mix-ups. In the Los Angeles area, the main reason is a California law that took effect in January 2014 and bars jails from holding prisoners for ICE beyond their normal release dates unless they have been charged with or previously convicted of a major crime. Jailers can still tell ICE that they are about to release a prisoner, but that could also soon be barred in California: A much more severe bill working its way through the state legislature would prohibit jails from sharing even the most basic prisoner information “for immigration enforcement purposes.”
Those arrested in ICE operations this morning in mid-June are taken to a processing center in San Bernardino. If they were previously deported, they could be returned to Mexico in a day or two. Photo credit: TONY MECIA / TWS
Cities and counties are also increasingly fearful of legal liability. Many sheriffs point to a 2012 case in Portland, Ore., stemming from an ICE detainer. Maria Miranda-Olivares had been arrested for violating a domestic-violence restraining order. Instead of releasing her after she posted $500 bail, the Clackamas County jail held her for two additional weeks until her case was resolved, then handed her over to ICE to begin deportation proceedings—exactly the way ICE thinks the process should work. But the woman, described in press reports as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico with two U.S.-born children, sued for false imprisonment. Her lawyer told the Oregonian that during her confinement she experienced a “mental health crisis and suicidal thoughts, she was locked up in a cold, dirty isolation cell [and] her anti-depressant medications were withheld for several days.”
A judge ruled in her favor in April 2014, and Miranda-Olivares got a $30,100 settlement from the county, plus attorneys’ fees. Her lawyer had been provided by the Oregon Law Center, a legal aid organization whose mission is to “achieve justice for the low-income communities of Oregon.” Its sources of funding include an annual $400,000 grant from the federal Department of Health and Human Services and donations from the Lawyers’ Campaign for Equal Justice, a legal-aid group supported by major Oregon law firms, banks, and corporations (among them Nike). Three weeks after the judge’s favorable ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union sent letters to all 58 counties in California highlighting the case.
The increased litigation, the activism, and the political interventions reflect an emerging public understanding of the immigration enforcement process. “More people are engaged,” says Royce Murray, policy director with the American Immigration Council, a research and policy organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants. “There was a long while where people inside and outside the government either took for granted how this should work because it has always worked this way, or they didn’t understand it. There is a new awareness of how these pieces come together.”
It’s unclear why Lucero was allowed to walk out of the Orange County jail in 2014. Orange County is generally one of the most cooperative in California in helping ICE agents identify the immigration status of people in its jails. It participates in the federal government’s 287(g) program, which allows jailers to double as immigration enforcement agents, and it has a good record of communicating with ICE. Its sheriff is outspoken in her opposition to the proposed California law that would further restrict communications with ICE.
Still, Orange County is bound by California law. Even when its police want ICE to come pick somebody up, ICE officers can’t always get there in time. “When the release date comes up for inmates with a detainer, we have to release them,” says Lt. Lane Lagaret, spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “We cannot hold them past their release dates, and if ICE doesn’t come to pick them up, they are let out the front door. It’s frustrating to release someone you know should not be getting released, but we have to comply with the law.”
THE MURDER OF KATE STEINLE
When counties change their policies, adapt to shifting laws and legal landscapes, and fail to honor ICE detainer requests, the system can break down. There can be tragic results. Consider the case of Kate Steinle, 32, who was walking in San Francisco’s Embarcadero district when she was shot and killed. The man charged with the crime, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, was an illegal immigrant and repeat felon who had been deported to Mexico five times.
In March 2015, Lopez-Sanchez was finishing a four-year federal prison sentence in Los Angeles for illegally entering the country. ICE had lodged a detainer, seeking custody of him upon release. But San Francisco also wanted Lopez-Sanchez, on an outstanding felony warrant for selling marijuana, and he was transferred there. The next day, ICE sent a detainer request to San Francisco. But when the drug charges were dropped a few weeks later, San Francisco released Lopez-Sanchez without notifying ICE. The release seems to have been in response to a directive from the San Francisco sheriff, who wrote in a March 2015 department-wide memo that staff should not share inmate release dates and times with ICE representatives. The sheriff said he was merely following the city’s “Due Process for All Ordinance,” passed unanimously by the city’s board of supervisors in 2013, that sought to limit cooperation with ICE. He also said ICE should have sought a judicial warrant to arrest Lopez-Sanchez, which would have had the force of law behind it and that his department would have honored. (ICE does seek criminal judicial warrants in some cases but says the process takes time thanks to the need to compile paperwork and coordinate with prosecutors.)
A little over two months later, court documents allege, Lopez-Sanchez stole a loaded .40-caliber SIG Sauer handgun from a park ranger’s vehicle. On July 1, 2015, as Steinle walked by the waterfront near Pier 14 of the Embarcadero, Lopez-Sanchez shot her in the chest, piercing her aorta. He later said he had taken sleeping pills and recalls few details. A wrongful death suit filed by the family describes Steinle’s last moments: Her father “held her as she fought for her life and begged for his help, crying, ‘Help me, Daddy!’ with her last words.” She died two hours later at San Francisco General Hospital.
TANGO ONE
The Steinle case was cited repeatedly by Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. It is the highest-profile example of the horrific outcomes that are possible when local jails deny detainer requests. Of course, many people who walk out of jail despite being sought by immigration authorities go on to do nothing wrong. Such is the case of Anselmo Moran Lucero. ICE has no record that he has had any encounters with law enforcement since Orange County released him in 2014.
For Lucero, though, his luck ran out in mid-June, when ICE went looking for him in Riverside County. ICE would not say precisely how Lucero landed on their radar, other than to say they have a team that is constantly looking for signs that those previously deported are back in the country. Over the previous few days, ICE officers watched what they thought was his house, confirmed his presence, and predicted that he would be there early in the morning.
As our caravan heads toward his house at about 5:30 a.m., there’s a hitch: Officers already on the scene have pulled over a car leaving his house, and Lucero wasn’t in it. The driver told them that Lucero, instead of being at the house as agents suspected, had ventured to a casino on a late-night trip and not yet returned. Agents fear the driver will tip off Lucero that the authorities are after him. Nonetheless, they stake out the house and wait.
We, instead, head across town toward the second target: a 24-year-old Mexican who was deported in 2011 following a drunk-driving arrest. He returned to the United States and has been arrested four times since 2014, all for assault with a deadly weapon. With at least one of those arrests, ICE says it lodged a detainer, which was not honored. The plan is to do a “knock and talk,” because ICE believes the subject will be asleep in the house.
At precisely 6 a.m., officers pull up to a one-story white wood house in a run-down neighborhood off a busy street. A chain-link fence closes off the front yard. Dogs are barking. Roosters crow in a neighbor’s yard. The darkness is giving way to an orange haze as the sun starts to push over the horizon.
ICE agents can’t enter a house or an enclosed yard without permission. After a few minutes of the dogs barking, a middle-aged Hispanic woman opens the door and sees a half-dozen agents wearing vests that say “POLICE” across her fence. She sighs, pulls her brown hair into a ponytail, puts her hands on her hips, and then walks slowly, barefoot, through the dirt, toward the fence.
A female ICE agent yells questions at her: “¿Quién vive aquí? ¿Cúantos?” Who lives here? How many?
They speak for a moment, then the woman returns inside. A few minutes later, a man comes out the front door, looking groggy. He’s in his forties, with dark close-cropped hair and a beard and is wearing only a pair of gym shorts. His name is Fidel Delgado Guerrero, and he’s some 20 years older than the man officers are seeking.
He talks to the ICE agents. After some discussion, he opens the gate. He’s allowing them to search the house.
Delgado might not know it, but people are not required to allow ICE agents onto their property. Unlike police serving an arrest warrant, who can enter houses to search for subjects without permission, ICE officers must rely on the residents’ cooperation. Immigrant-rights groups have been trying to spread the word that if ICE comes knocking, just don’t answer the door.
As the agents enter the house, others take positions in the front yard and to the sides. Some 15 minutes later, officers have found no sign of the 24-year-old they are seeking, whom they believe is Delgado’s son. He tells them his son moved to Texas a year ago. It’s not clear that officers believe him, because they have information placing the younger man at the house earlier in the week, and the son’s most recent arrest was in August 2016 in Riverside. Also in the house is a 16-year-old boy, another son.
With no sign of their suspect, officers check the backgrounds of the people who are there. A process that used to be cumbersome is now almost instantaneous. They use an iPhone, a Bluetooth-connected fingerprint scanner and an app called EDDIE. It sends biometric data to be compared against federal databases. ICE says that information shows that Delgado and his wife were caught in 2008 trying to cross the border twice in a 24-hour period near El Paso, Texas. They were sent back to Mexico both times. Beyond that, they have had no other brushes with law enforcement.
If the Kate Steinle case is the emotional incident favored by opponents of sanctuary cities, then people such as Delgado and his wife—avoiding trouble, raising a family—are examples of what immigration-rights groups see as overzealous enforcement. During the Obama administration, it is possible that the couple would have avoided arrest as a matter of policy, because enforcement priorities tilted toward those with criminal convictions and those who came over the border recently. In 2015 and 2016, just 5 percent of 16,316 people arrested by ICE’s Los Angeles field office had no criminal convictions. The Trump administration has largely rescinded those guidelines and leaves decisions on cases like the Delgados’ to the officers in the field. This year, the figure has risen to 9 percent.
Another way to look at the Delgado example is to note that ICE officers wouldn’t even be at his house had the local jail honored the detainer on the 24-year-old being sought. ICE would have deported their target and been somewhere else this morning, instead of rousing Delgado, his wife, and younger son from their sleep.
Although ICE could arrest Delgado and his wife, the presence of the 16-year-old boy creates a problem. By law, they can’t leave him by himself. Instead, officers decide to arrest just Delgado and follow up later with his wife. They let him put on jeans and a shirt, handcuff him, and lead him across the street into the back of a Dodge Grand Caravan. A half-mile away, to avoid any crowds that might form at his house, officers take Delgado out of the van, search him thoroughly, attach a waist chain, and remove his belt.
David Marin, a former marine who is the head of enforcement and removal operations for ICE’s L.A. field office and is one of the two agents media are allowed to identify from this ride-along, explains the decision to take Delgado into custody: “Both have been previously deported. This is somebody who shouldn’t be in the country.” he says. “We explained to him, ‘You have no right to be here. You’ll have to come with us.’ And he asked, ‘What about my wife?’ ”
THREE FOR THREE
As they are getting ready to leave the Delgado home, ICE agents receive some good news. Lucero, their first “tango,” came back from the casino. Officers waiting by his house spotted him, pulled him over in his car, and arrested him.
The third target this morning is a 51-year-old Mexican national who used to be a legal U.S. resident but was convicted on drug charges in 1998 and deported. ICE records show he was deported a second time in 2012, following another arrest on drug-trafficking charges. He tried to re-cross the border in 2013 but was caught and sent back for a third time.
ICE believes the man’s routine is to leave for work every morning at 7:30 and stop for a cup of coffee at the Subway sandwich shop attached to a Chevron station a mile away on Center Street. The plan is to pull over his vehicle, believed to be a Chevy or Toyota pickup, before he stops for coffee.
The two media vehicles wait about a block away from the house, and a description of the action comes over the radio at 7:44 a.m.:
By the time we arrive, agents have handcuffed a man with black hair and a thick black moustache. He’s telling officers that the truck is not his, and he only wants to return the keys to the owner.
To search him more thoroughly, they take him to a parking lot down the road, which happens to be the same place the man stops for his morning coffee. Three Subway workers look out the window at the commotion.
Nora Kilgore, a Latina who works at the adjacent Herbalife store, comes outside to take a look, too. She says she’s surprised at the presence of ICE officers. “Immigration? It’s immigration?” she says. “Are they going to come for me? I don’t have my papers.” She says she’s joking and adds that she hasn’t seen immigration arrests around here before. “I guess they gotta do what they gotta do,” she says.
That’s the action for the day, at least for the media tag-alongs. Agents targeted a fourth subject, a 28-year-old Mexican national with a felony drug conviction and a drunk-driving arrest, but he never came home. While we were waiting for him, ICE nabbed target number five, a 46-year-old Kuwaiti-born Lebanese national with nine convictions, including six felonies. Officers watching his home in a trailer park spotted his vehicle leaving sooner than expected, pulled him over, and made the arrest.
Around the same time, ICE officers watching the sixth location made a further arrest. They were looking for a 42-year-old U.S. resident from Mexico who was convicted in 2015 of two felonies: domestic violence and animal cruelty. He served nine months in jail but was released without ICE being notified and has been arrested twice in the last four months on lesser charges. They didn’t find him, but they found somebody meeting deportation criteria leaving the house. So, for ICE it was five arrests in six locations this June morning around Riverside, Calif.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The county sheriff says Riverside is not any kind of sanctuary. Asked about its policy on detainers, a spokesman for the county police points to a two-page policy memo that concluded: “After a lengthy legal review, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department will continue to notify ICE of pending releases that ICE specifically requests.” Yet ICE says Riverside is not always cooperative. In the three national reports the Trump administration issued on communities that were declining detainer requests, Riverside showed up three times for failing to notify agents about pending releases during just the second week of February.
Does repeatedly releasing inmates sought by ICE make Riverside a sanctuary county? Or were these just mistakes and logistical snafus? It’s hard to know how the Trump administration will crack down on sanctuary cities when it is difficult to define them. Estimates of the number of sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide vary widely, from 140 to 300.
ICE says Fidel Delgado Guerrero, above, and his wife are eligible for deportation because they tried to cross into the U.S. in 2008 and were caught, though they have had no other run-ins with the law. Delgado later was released while deportation proceedings continue. Photo credit: TONY MECIA / TWS
In January, Trump signed an executive order giving the secretary of homeland security the power to deny federal grants to sanctuary jurisdictions. It’s an effort that doesn’t force them to comply—that would raise serious constitutional questions—but rather seeks to create an incentive for their cooperation. It’s a strategy similar to the one that upped the legal drinking age to 21 in the 1980s: The federal government couldn’t force states to raise their drinking ages, but they could turn off the spigot of federal highway money. With such a threat, states quickly complied. The threat of cutting off federal money is one reason why some cities are reluctant to label themselves a “sanctuary.” They don’t want to make themselves targets.
Some jurisdictions are fighting back, and the battleground, as with so much of the Trump agenda, is the courts. In April, a federal judge in Northern California, in response to a lawsuit by San Francisco and Santa Clara County, ruled that Trump has no authority to establish conditions for federal spending: “Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement can’t be threatened merely because the jurisdiction chooses an immigration enforcement strategy of which the president disapproves,” the judge said.
Thirty-four cities and counties nationwide—including Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Denver, Austin, and Portland—plus the state of California filed briefs in support of the lawsuit. The AFL-CIO and two other labor unions also joined the legal resistance. The Trump administration argued that any court action was premature, since no money had actually been stripped. Chief of staff Reince Priebus told reporters after the ruling that it was another example of “the 9th Circuit going bananas” and that the administration would appeal. A White House statement said the ruling was “a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country.”
Justice could certainly take a more punitive approach and level federal charges against the jurisdictions that most aggressively block efforts to enforce immigration law. Federal law says that it is a crime if somebody “conceals, harbors, or shields from detection” an immigrant who is in the country illegally. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they are looking at all of these cases and finding the right one to make an example out of somebody,” says Claude Arnold, a former head of criminal investigations for ICE’s L.A. field office. Such a move would clearly raise the stakes for local law-enforcement officials.
Another option is to deploy the Justice Department to offer more robust defenses of federal rights. In late June, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal lawyers are developing strategies to “win court rulings clarifying local jurisdictions’ requirements under federal law, effectively forcing them to abandon policies of not cooperating with federal officials.”
And legislation pending in Congress would strengthen the administration’s legal hand. In late June, the House passed two measures—including the one called “Kate’s Law” after Steinle—that would give detainers more heft, indemnify jails that hold illegal immigrants for ICE, increase criminal penalties for people returning to the United States who were previously deported, and allow the executive branch to cut off money to noncompliant jurisdictions.
The bills attracted slight Democratic support in the House, but winning Senate approval of the bills will be tougher, as Democrats promise to fight any Republican measures opposing immigration. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) told the Hill: “I will do whatever I can in order to stop them. These are only punitive in nature, [and] they don’t deal with the totality of the reality of our immigration challenge.” Blackman, the South Texas law professor, notes that courts have already found that detainers do not carry the same weight as judicial warrants and the new laws might not end the court battles. Efforts to restrict grants, he says, are on stronger legal footing.
What seems the most certain is that all of this will eventually be decided in the courts.
THE DAY’S WORK
At about 10:45 a.m. ICE officers unload their five captives at a processing center in San Bernardino, about half-an-hour away from Riverside. One at a time, the prisoners walk in, take off their shoes, and have their restraints removed. The Mexican nationals are questioned in Spanish:
What is your full name?
Do you have medical problems?
Are you gay or transsexual?
From there, they are moved to a holding cell. Within a few hours, they will likely be moved to an ICE detention center, probably in Adelanto, another 45 minutes north. The Mexicans who have been previously deported could very well be on a bus back to Mexico within a day or two.
At this point, ICE allows the media to ask those who were arrested if they would like to speak to journalists, which requires them to sign a waiver. Lucero and Delgado agreed to be interviewed. (ICE requested that we not identify the other three suspects.)
Lucero says he works as a gardener and has a lot of family here. He’s not sure if he will try to return: “I need to think hard about that.”
Delgado says it’s his first arrest in 16 years of living here. He says he works on a dairy farm, earning less than $3,000 a month. ICE released Delgado that afternoon after determining he “posed no threat to public safety.” He was free to return to his wife and son, but his deportation case is ongoing.
Looking back on the day’s work, Marin, the local ICE head of enforcement, says catching three of six targets and two others is “representative of our daily operations. That’s what our guys are doing every single day.” He says it was a success because nobody got hurt.
He says he would be happy even if his team didn’t catch as many as they did today: “Even if we just caught one, that’s still one criminal alien who we removed from the country who is not going to commit any more crimes.”
Tony Mecia is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
