Holding signs that read “families belong together” and “no persons are illegal,” immigration advocates made their way to the Board of Supervisors Chamber last Thursday to tell Marin County Sheriff Bob Doyle to end his cooperation with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their chant, “Doyle, listen, deportations are not your mission,” echoed through the pink halls.
The occasion: a meeting to discuss the way the county jail deals with undocumented immigrants and ICE. Under California’s Transparent Review of Unjust Transfers and Holds—or TRUTH—Act, signed in 2016, officials must hold a community forum if local law enforcement provides ICE with access to individuals for civil immigration purposes.
Until two weeks ago, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office had chosen to proactively provide notification to ICE when an undocumented immigrant was released from jail. But on Nov. 30, Sheriff Doyle rescinded the policy, saying that going forward, his office would no longer issue such notifications except in specific cases outlined in the TRUTH Act, such as for inmates convicted of a serious or violent felony.
He explained during the forum that he had been alarmed by the “horrific” statements made by the Trump administration and by the tenor of the issue in Washington. Still, community members had plenty of questions.
According to the canal alliance, roughly six percent of the county’s population is comprised of undocumented immigrants. When someone is arrested, his or her fingerprints go into a database that ICE can access and use to flag individuals they want to apprehend from the jail.
Lucia Martel-Dow, director of immigration and social services at the Canal Alliance, said 54 percent of ICE apprehensions in Marin happen as a result of local incarceration. Between October 2014 and April 2018, 307 people have been deported from Marin.
Before Thursday’s meeting, Sheriff Doyle met with the Alliance and the Immigrant Law Resource Center to discuss a number of issues, including the office’s online posting of individuals’ release dates and the transfer of undocumented immigrants from the jail into ICE custody.
The Sheriff’s Office publishes release dates in its online booking log: a practice it only started after the passage of the TRUTH Act. Yet Sheriff Doyle argues that release dates are public information and serve a variety of needs: those of victims, family members, friends and loved ones. “We didn’t put release dates on the booking log to provide assistance to ICE,” he said.
People also objected to the practice of releasing prisoners to ICE custody inside the jail’s booking area instead of in the lobby, which is a public place, because they said this essentially walked immigrants directly into ICE’s hands. Sheriff Doyle said this choice had been made because ICE could “subject people [inside the lobby who were there] to pick up the person to an interview, to check their documentation. And watching a family member be handcuffed would be pretty difficult for family to witness.”
Under California’s Values Act, passed this year, law enforcement agencies cannot honor a transfer unless it is authorized by a judicial warrant or the individual in custody meets one of the exemptions outlined in the TRUTH Act.
According to the Values Act, said Frank Shinneman, an affiliate of the Marin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, “the transfers shouldn’t be taking place. The sheriff said at the meeting—and county counsel said before him—that they don’t consider what he’s doing to be a transfer. But it’s a hot handoff. The inmate being transferred to ICE is always in custody and ICE is allowed to come into [the booking area]. They take the jail handcuffs off and put on the ICE handcuffs.”
County counsel Brian Washington views the situation differently, saying the way the sheriff releases people to ICE is not the same as a transfer. He added that the TRUST Act affirms that ICE can go into jails, though certain counties have barred the agents from doing so.
“The way we look at a transfer is putting that inmate in a vehicle and transferring that person via vehicle to an ICE facility, which we’re 100 percent not doing,” said Jamie Scardina, a captain at the Sheriff’s Office’s detention service bureau.
At the beginning of Thursday’s forum, Mr. Washington said the Board of Supervisors’ hands were largely tied in matters of local law enforcement: California law provides restrictions on the board’s authority because, in Marin, the sheriff has authority over the jail and its prisoners. ”While the county can have rules and procedures to the extent that it concerns law enforcement or jail activity, the sheriff has exclusive jurisdiction,” Mr. Washington said.
But once the open comment period began, many members of the public disputed this interpretation of the supervisors’ power. Speaking to the board, Stephen Bingham, a former Legal Aid lawyer, said, “Mr. Washington at the beginning got you guys off the hook by saying the sheriff is in charge and does what he wants. It’s not true. You set the budget, you set the budget for the sheriff, you could explicitly say, ‘No dime of this county is going to pay for that website until he takes the release data off.’”
Mr. Shinneman added that there were other workarounds to divest power from the sheriff. He pointed to precedent in a 1994 case in San Diego that gave county supervisors control to create a citizens’ review board that would oversee public complaints about the sheriff and had the power to subpoena documents and witnesses.
But Mr. Washington told the Light that the San Diego case was not applicable to Marin, as San Diego, unlike Marin, is a charter county and thus governed by different rules. Additionally, he said, due to a state attorney general opinion that “says you can’t do indirectly what you can’t do directly,” it would not be feasible for the board to try and control the sheriff using their purse strings.
Some people shared personal stories of the impacts ICE has had on their own lives. Alejandro Lopez was born in Marin but raised in Mexico. He returned to the county in 2012, and six months ago his worst fears were realized after his father was deported.
“That has left me unable to receive benefits from health insurance to treat my chronic mental condition,” Mr. Lopez said. “When family members are directly attacked by ICE, it truly impacts the entire family and community. I was left behind with bills to pay and would have ended up homeless if it hadn’t been for the help of community.”
Others shared ways in which the working relationship between the Sheriff’s Office and ICE has had broader impacts on communities. “Collaborating with ICE has created fear. It’s real; it’s affected our community and it’s having a trickle affect,” said Jorge Martinez Perez, a member of the West Marin Rapid Response Network.
Everyone who spoke advocated for less county cooperation with ICE, save one—Adrian Ivancevich, who identified himself as a former prosecutor. “Sheriff Doyle, do your job and enforce the law and get illegal immigrants out of our community,” he said to loud boos and catcalls from the rest of the room.
Mr. Ivancevich began listing off crimes that were not contained within the TRUTH Act’s “serious and violent” categories. “If you protect the criminals, we’re going to remember,” he said.
Once the comment section ended, Sheriff Doyle noted that he “never heard one speaker talk about people who have been victimized by crimes [committed by undocumented immigrants].” He also warned that one unintended consequence in areas where local law enforcement ceased cooperating with ICE is that it drove the federal agency further into the community as a result of being unable to access jails.
(Mr. Scardina told the Light that although the Sheriff’s Office has not been keeping data on the types of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, they will start tracking that information moving forward for any individual whom they release into ICE custody.)
“Santa Clara has a really wonderful provision that says ICE isn’t allowed to enter the jail unless [the agency] has a juridical warrant,” said Grisel Ruiz, a staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center who noted that it is extremely rare for ICE to have such a warrant. “That would be a great thing to see in Marin and, frankly, in other areas and other counties, because if you were to restrict ICE access to the jail, you would cut off a lot of the other police-ICE collaboration we see frequently.”
The sheriff’s removal of one policy around ICE collaboration is not enough to eliminate the need for community forums moving forward, Ms. Ruiz added. “While we definitely applaud the sheriff that there are advances happening in Marin, until there is a total cessation and cooperation completely stops, the forums will continue to be required,” she said. “Any cooperation that happens to any degree is generally voluntary. I feel like that gets lost. This is an active choice: [the sheriff] is actively putting release dates online. These are very intentional decisions.”
No commitments or policy changes were made by the end of the forum, which ran for over three hours. Supervisors spoke about the need to allay community fears and live up to the values of Marin County. Supervisor Dennis Rodoni told those assembled, “Tonight it’s the start of a conversation that makes it all better”—a comment that sent two young women out of the room muttering, “We already know they’re not going to do shit.”
Supervisor Damon Connolly gave a more forceful statement, advocating for active policy reform.
“I don’t want to see our local officials assist a dysfunctional immigration policy for the federal government,” he said. “I appreciate the sheriff changing the policy responding to written immigration requests from ICE, but I would like to see further policy change. The warm hand-off of persons to ICE in the booking area has the effect of a firm custody transfer, in my view… ICE should conduct its business outside the jurisdiction of the sheriff, without any help from the Sheriff’s Office. We have made progress, and we can do better.”