California Governor Brown Signs TRUST Act

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on Saturday limiting the state's cooperation with federal immigration authorities, a direct indictment and rebuke of the Obama administration's enforcement policy that has led to record deportations from the state.

As the Congress stalls on immigration reform, action continues in the states, and advocates and politicians in California hope they can serve as an example of how to do it right.

“While Washington waffles on immigration, California’s forging ahead,” Brown said in a press release after signing the legislation into law. "I’m not waiting.”

The new California law, known as the Trust Act, limits the state's cooperation with Secure Communities, a federal program that allows the Department of Homeland Security to access fingerprints taken by local police, to screen detained individuals for immigration status and to request that law enforcement agencies hold them if they're found to be undocumented.

Democratic Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, the top sponsor of the Trust Act, said before Brown's signature that he hopes state actions like California's will put more pressure on Congress, rather than drawing attention to the legislative fights there.

"It makes it all the more important that California be on the lead on this," he said. "If we get the governor's signature, it will be really a benchmark. It will be one of the first states that has gone on record about this program. ... And hopefully, it will signal to D.C. that they need to start moving."

Advocates have been pushing for the Trust Act for years, and finally succeeded in getting the bill to limit Secure Communities past both houses in 2012.

But Brown vetoed last year's version of the legislation, calling the bill “fatally flawed.” Brown faulted the earlier version of the Trust Act for barring the state from detaining individuals on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement even when they were charged with or convicted of significant crimes, including offenses involving child abuse, drug trafficking and gang activity. This year’s version of the Trust Act addressed those concerns by making the list of crimes classified as serious offenses more extensive.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who recently because president of the University of California system, shifted on the Trust Act and urged Brown earlier this week to support it -- even though the Secure Communities expanded across the country under her watch.

California isn't the typical state on immigration and the population is now about 38 percent Latino, compared to the roughly 17 percent of the population made up by Latinos nationwide. California is also among the most immigrant-friendly states in the country. The legislature passed a bill last month to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, following steps taken by 10 other states.

Yet California isn't the only state or locality that has at least attempted to limit the scope of Secure Communities. Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and the District of Columbia either attempted to opt-out of the program or passed laws instructing law enforcement to ignore orders to hold individuals. But no area was exempted from the program -- Secure Communities is now implemented nationwide, in 3,181 jurisdictions.

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen previously declined to comment on the California legislation while it was pending, but said the agency has made identifying and removing criminal offenders its "highest priority" and has implemented reforms toward that end. ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Supporters of the Trust Act say Secure Communities makes immigrant communities fearful of police and less likely to report crime, in case in doing so they reveal their undocumented status and get into trouble.

"This is more a law enforcement issue than an immigration issue," Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who has criticized Secure Communities, recently told HuffPost in an interview. "What this will do for law enforcement in California is that it will ensure that immigrants collaborate with law enforcement."

Secure Communities -- or S-Comm, as its opponents refer to it -- isn't designed to ensnare people without criminal records who get into fender benders. Despite reforms aimed at limiting holds for non-serious offenders, a report released Tuesday by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that plenty of people were held even when it was against ICE policy to do so.

The program is also expensive when used on a broader basis, beyond serious criminals. Requests to detain are supposed to last 48 hours at most, but law enforcement officials sometimes keep people longer, according to reports. A report from Justice Strategies in August 2012 found that Los Angeles County was spending more than $26 million a year to hold undocumented immigrants who it would otherwise release if it weren't for ICE requests to hold them. Justice Strategies estimated that California taxpayers were spending $65 million each year to hold immigrants for ICE.

National groups opposed to comprehensive immigration reform, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national group against legalization for undocumented immigrants, urged supporters to contact California lawmakers and ask them to oppose the Trust Act. "This bill would undermine public safety in my community and impede the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law," the group's suggested script read.

But advocates of the bill said it is a major step forward toward broader immigration reform in the U.S., and applauded its passage.

New Report from Florida International University Finds DHS Secure Communities Not Targeting "Dangerous Criminals" As Directed By Obama Administration

Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in South Florida are failing to abide by an Obama administration directive to focus deportation efforts on dangerous criminals, according to a report Monday by a Miami-based immigration advocacy group and researchers from a Florida university.

A majority of undocumented immigrants detained for deportation in Miami-Dade County under a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiative known as the Secure Communities program were not serious criminals, the report by Americans for Immigrant Justice (AIJ) and researchers at Florida International University said.

This is a pattern that is repeated across the country and the San Francisco Bay Area is no exception. Many of the deportations involve people who likely would be covered under proposals for an immigration reform bill currently being thrashed out by members of Congress.

The actions of ICE agents are at odds with guidance issued in June 2011 by the head of ICE, John Morton, who sought to prioritize the removal of convicted undocumented immigrants who posed a danger to national security or public safety, as well as those who game the system by dodging immigration hearings.

In a statement, ICE said it had received guidance restricting the detention of immigrants for minor misdemeanor offenses such as traffic infractions and other petty crimes. The guideline gives ICE discretion on how it is implemented.

See the entire report below.

False Promises: The Failure of Secure Communities

UNFDDS8HZGUA

Recently Release Report Finds Over 5,000 Children Of Deported Aliens Are Being Placed Into Foster Care

In fiscal year 2011, the United States deported a record-breaking 397,000 people and detained nearly that many. According to federal data released to the Applied Research Center, through a Freedom of Information Act request, a growing number and proportion of deportees are parents. In the first six months of 2011, the federal government removed more than 46,000 mothers and fathers of U.S.-citizen children. These deportations shatter families and endanger the children left behind.

This “Shattered Families” report is the first to provide evidence on the national scope and scale of the problem. As more noncitizens are detained, the number of children in foster care with parents removed by ICE is expected to grow. Without explicit policies and guidelines to protect families, children will continue to lose their families at alarming rates.

Among the Key Finding In the Report:

• That there are at least 5,100 children currently living in foster care whose parents have been either detained or deported (this projection is based on data collected from six key states and an analysis of trends in 14 additional states with similarly high numbers of foster care and foreign-born populations). This is approximately 1.25 percent of the total children in foster care. If the same rate holds true for new cases, in the next five years, at least 15,000 more children will face these threats to reunification with their detained and deported mothers and fathers. These children face formidable barriers to reunification with their families.

• In areas where local police aggressively participate in immigration enforcement, children of noncitizens are more likely to be separated from their parents and face barriers to reunification. For example, in counties where local police have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, children in foster care were, on average, about 29 percent more likely to have a detained or deported parent than in other counties. The impact of aggressive immigration enforcement remains statistically significant when our research controls for the size of a county’s foreign-born population and a county’s proximity to the border.

• Immigrant victims of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence are at particular risk of losing their children. Approximately one in nine of the stories recounted to ARC in interviews and focus groups involved domestic violence. As a result of ICE’s increased use of local police and jails to enforce immigration laws, when victims of violence are arrested, ICE too often detains them and their children enter foster care. Many immigrant victims face an impossible choice: remain with an abuser or risk detention and the loss of their children.

• ARC has identified at least 22 states where these cases have emerged in the last two years. This is a growing national problem, not one confined to border jurisdictions or states. Across the 400 counties included in our projections, more than one in four (28.8 percent) of the foster care children with detained or deported parents are from non-border states. Whether children enter foster care as a direct result of their parents’ detention or deportation, or they were already in the child welfare system, immigration enforcement systems erect often-insurmountable barriers to family unity.

ICE Director John Morton Kills California's TRUST Act

In a report issued today by the Immigrant Youth Coalition, IYC accused ICE Director John Morton of single-handedly sabotaging the efforts of the California Legislature to mitigate the harsh effects of the "Secure Communities" by the passage of the TRUST Act. In order to stop the California TRUST Act which had gained widespread support, Immigration Customs Enforcement's Director John Morton went as far as to blackmail the Governor of California into vetoing the TRUST Act. When advocates asked the governors office why Brown vetoed the bill, the staff responded that they had received a call from John Morton Director of ICE saying that if Brown doesn't veto the TRUST Act that California would essentially go back to the old days in reference to immigration raids and more overt enforcement. California would have been the first state in which the impact of "Secure Communities" would be significantly reduced by not honoring immigration detainers. California holds one of the largest undocumented immigrant population in the nation, and deports about 80,000 undocumented immigrants about one fourth of the yearly quota for deportations that the Department of homeland security set in 2010. John Morton could not allow for the TRUST Act to pass, with the Deferred Action for Childhood arrivals now being implemented the pool of deportable immigrants shrunk by almost a million. ICE needed to make sure they meet their 400,000 a year quota for deportations and so they intervened in state politics to ensure the survival of "Secure Communities" If the "Prosecutorial Discretion" memo were actually implemented, laws like the TRUST Act wouldn't be necessary. The TRUST Act would ensure that people with minor or no offenses would be let go without any immigration consequences; it was California's way of holding the Federal Government accountable.

California Legislature Contemplates the TRUST ACT

The California Legislature recently passed the TRUST Act and the bill has been sent to the Governor so signature. The bill aims to correct the inherent flaws of the federal Secure Communities program.

For nearly three years, the Obama administration has advertised the Secure Communities program as a targeted enforcement tool that identifies "dangerous criminal aliens" for deportation. Over and over, federal officials have insisted that the program's focus would be chiefly limited to those immigrants whose criminal convictions show that they pose a danger to public safety.

But that's not the case. In practice, Secure Communities is a dragnet that fails to distinguish between felons convicted of serious crimes and nonviolent arrestees facing civil immigration violations. In California alone, more than half of the 75,000 people deported under the program since it began in 2009 had no criminal history or had only misdemeanor convictions.

Under the program, local law enforcement agencies are required to send the fingerprints of everyone booked into local jails to the FBI, which checks them against criminal databases. Department of Homeland Security officials then check the prints against immigration records and issue requests, known as "detainers," to local authorities asking them to hold particular individuals for 48 hours. As a result, immigrants arrested for illegal street vending or driving without a license who would ordinarily be released have to sit in jail for two days. After that, they are either transferred to federal custody or released, although some end up in jail for longer.

Local officials across the country are deeply concerned about having to spend their scarce resources filling already overcrowded jails with non-dangerous arrestees, and are also concerned that the program will undermine law enforcement by deterring immigrants from cooperating with police. So California lawmakers have passed the Trust Act, which would require police to release those who have posted bail, face no serious charges and have no prior serious criminal convictions, despite federal detainers. Officials in New York, the District of Columbia and Cook County, Ill., already have similar rules in place.