Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes blasted a state sanctuary law that bars local law enforcement from contacting immigration officials when an undocumented immigrant is held in county jail, but he said he won’t direct his deputies to enforce immigration laws.
“We have no desire to enforce immigration law — we never have and we never will,” Barnes said during a board of supervisors meeting Tuesday. “But we must have the ability to communicate and share threats and removal of criminal offenders who prey upon our community, often within the immigrant communities in which they reside.”
During the same meeting, Barnes called for the repeal of SB 54, a law approved by voters in 2017 and drafted in part as a response to the first Trump administration’s policies to ramp up deportations and immigrant detentions.
Now, Trump has called for massive deportations during his second term, including targeting some visa holders and immigrants with no criminal history, prompting new scrutiny on the state law as local law enforcement agencies try to determine how, if at all, they will cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Trump’s latest push for deportations, and California’s defiance, puts local law enforcement officials in a precarious spot.
Under SB 54, local law enforcement officials are barred from spending money or resources on federal immigration enforcement. However, the law allows local enforcement officials to screen inmates, when asked by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, if they have been convicted of certain violent felonies and misdemeanors, such as assault, battery, child abuse or sexual abuse among other crimes.
If the inmates have not been convicted of such crimes, the law prohibits local law enforcement from notifying ICE when they will be released from custody.
In Orange County last year, county jail officials were asked by ICE officials to screen 633 inmates detained at the county jail. Of those inmates, 226 were referred over to ICE as being in the country illegally. The federal agency detained 186 of those inmates, according to state-mandated disclosures released Tuesday.
Some immigration rights advocates spoke out during the Tuesday meeting and criticized supervisors and the sheriff for continuing to do immigrant screenings in the jails, and urged county officials to stop cooperating with federal immigration officials.
Although deputies and local law enforcement are barred from routinely asking about immigration status when speaking to a suspect or witness, advocates said the cooperation of local law enforcement with immigration officials could undermine public trust and deter people from reaching out to police.
“It undermines public safety and it undermines our local economy,” said Carlos Perea, executive director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice.
Barnes stressed that deputies in the state’s third-largest county were focused on enforcing state and local laws, not immigration laws. But he also made it clear he supports greater cooperation with immigration officials when it comes to undocumented immigrants detained in the county jail, although he said his agency would continue to follow state law.
Speaking to supervisors Tuesday, Barnes criticized the so-called sanctuary law, and offered examples of immigrants who were arrested in Orange County, released and re-arrested for other crimes, including kidnapping, narcotics sales and child abuse.
“Those not picked up by ICE continue to victimize our community and consume law enforcement resources,” he said.
Of the 633 inmates who ICE asked to be screened in Orange County, 407 of them did not meet the state’s criteria for notifying federal officials, Barnes said.
Notifying federal officials of those who do meet the criteria, however, is left to the discretion of law enforcement.
That option has also already caused confrontations between local officials who disagree as to how much, if any, law enforcement should be involved in immigration enforcement.
In February, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said his deputies would not be involved in immigration enforcement.
The statement, shared in a video posted on social media, was shared partly to address rumors that Riverside deputies had been involved in immigration raids, Bianco said.
Bianco, an outspoken supporter of President Trump, has criticized California’s sanctuary law.
But Bianco told Fox 11 LA he would be “working somehow around SB 54 with ICE.”
San Diego County Supervisors adopted a policy in December that would stop jail staff from working with federal officials at all, regardless of the inmate’s previous convictions.
But San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez, who oversees the jails, pushed back against the board of supervisors, and has said she won’t comply with the county policy.
Martinez argued that, as an elected official and overseer of the jails, only she could set policies for the Sheriff’s Department, and vowed to continue to notify ICE when someone not authorized to be in the country was released from county jail.
In Orange County, supervisors seemed mostly in support of the sheriff’s policies.
Supervisor Don Wagner pointed out that the 226 inmates who were referred to ICE constituted a small part of the more than 48,000 bookings that occurred in the jail last year.
“The sheriff is to be saluted, not condemned for the very judicious use of his power that he’s outlined today,” Wagner said.
