California: Sanctuary Cities Imperil the Undocumented
Sanctuary cities are increasing the chances that otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants will be arrested. Relatives and friends of criminals are being swept up when officers show up at the homes of wanted immigrants the cities refuse to detain.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are increasingly encountering “criminals at their houses instead of collecting them from jails,” Tony Mecia reports in the Weekly Standard. As a result, “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.”
That’s what happened to Fidel Delgado Guerrero, a Mexican living with his family in Riverside County, California. When ICE officials came looking for his son – who had multiple arrests – they found and arrested him. Mecia writes:
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.
Mecia captured that scene while following a group of ICE officers in California last month as they searched for six illegal immigrants. The action is limited and unremarkable. But that the article provides a good overview of the debate surrounding sanctuary cities – especially between local communities that do not want to devote resources to immigration issues and the federal government which says their lack of cooperation puts them in harm’s way.
Mecia starts his description of the legal landscape at ICE’s Pacific Enforcement Response Center in Laguna Niguel, California. He writes:
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.
