Are sanctuary laws driving down immigration arrests in Northern California?
Tal Kopan Dec. 14, 2018
WASHINGTON —Immigration arrests fell in Northern California in the past year even as arrests nationally rose 11 percent, a trend that may be linked to tightening sanctuary laws that limit local cooperation with U.S. deportation agents.
But while fewer people in the region were arrested overall, arrests of noncriminal immigrants went up, according to data released Friday, reflecting Trump administration policies that anyone in the country without documentation is a target for enforcement.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that oversees Northern California was one of only a handful nationally to see fewer arrests in the 2018 fiscal year — which ended Sept. 30 — than in 2017. The 14 percent drop in arrests was the steepest decline in the country.
The office, based in San Francisco, was also the only one in the country to post fewer arrests in 2018 than fiscal 2016, the last under President Barack Obama.
Under President Trump, arrests of undocumented immigrants, especially noncriminal ones, have been steadily climbing, as he has made immigration enforcement and border security his central pitches to voters.
Overall, ICE arrested nearly 160,000 immigrants last fiscal year, 34 percent of whom had no criminal convictions. That was an 11 percent increase in arrests overall, but was almost entirely driven by the surge in arrests of noncriminal immigrants. Arrests of those with a criminal conviction slightly trailed the year before.
The story was similar for deportations, which were up overall nationally but dipped slightly in Northern California.
Trump and his deputies have declared that no undocumented immigrant is exempt from the government’s grasp, a change from a policy adopted late in President Obama’s administration that focused ICE’s efforts and finite resources primarily on criminals.
The administration has focused particular ire toward sanctuary cities and has clashed repeatedly with Bay Area and California officials over their policies. The administration sued unsuccessfully to try to block California’s sanctuary law from going into effect after Gov. Jerry Brown signed it in late 2017, and engaged in a heated back-and-forth with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf this year after she issued a preemptive public warning about a planned immigration sweep in the region.
It’s difficult to know why San Francisco lagged behind the rest of the country in arrests, but sanctuary laws could be a factor, especially those that limit cooperation between local jails and ICE officers who want to pick up undocumented inmates. ICE officials did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.
The data varied substantially by region. The San Diego sector saw among the biggest increases in arrests in the past year, up 32 percent overall with noncriminals representing more than half of those arrested, a jump that could be related to surges of migrants arriving at the border there.
The Los Angeles office, however, was more in line with San Francisco. There, ICE made 7 percent fewer arrests in fiscal 2018, though the agency also arrested a slightly higher number of noncriminal immigrants.
Former Obama administration ICE Director John Sandweg said regions rarely see varying numbers due to conscious decisions.
“It certainly isn’t, and almost never is a, ‘Hey guys, let’s do more or less in this area of responsibility.’ That’s just not the way it works,” Sandweg said.
His best guess to explain the discrepancy in Northern California was the limitation on ICE’s access to jails. Having to arrest more immigrants in the community takes more time and resources than the “efficient” handover of an immigrant in a jail, he said.
That could also explain why more noncriminal immigrants got caught up in the crosshairs, he added.
“This is an unintended consequence of sanctuary policies that I’m not sure is always thought through,” Sandweg said. “If you say no to picking up people in jail, there are going to be some dangerous people we feel compelled to get, so when you do that, you’re not just exposing those dangerous people to ICE but their family, their friends, their neighbors.”
Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan
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Other possible explanations for the pattern of non-criminal arrests in Northern California:
- Retaliation for “Sanctuary Cities” laws and for suits finding Sessions’s “Anti-Sanctuary Crusade” illegal;
- Need to meet “arrest quotas” for annual bonuses (just like U.S. Immigration Judges, except they are ineligible for bonuses — but the Director and other “Managers” in Falls Church can pocket some extra cash by revving up removals to please the DOJ politicos).
I also wouldn’t put too much store on the so-called “criminal arrest” numbers put out by DHS either. DHS tends to jack up numbers by concentrating on relatively minor offenders rather than hunting down the real “bad guys” which tends to produce lower numbers.
Indeed, in the Federal bureaucracy the “quantity” that produces budget increases is almost always in tension with “quality” which is harder to quantify and certainly harder for Congressional staff to comprehend and “sell” and for individual legislators to take credit. For example, Session’s wasteful program of prosecuting first time border jumpers for misdemeanors probably produced lots of bogus “criminal removals” and perhaps some “criminal arrests” without actually accomplishing anything useful. Indeed most evidence suggests that while wasting time on Sessions’s “racist follies,” Federal prosecutors actually reduced investigation and prosecution of real crimes (e.g. serious felonies) in Federal Courts. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2018/08/as-zero-tolerance-cases-skyrocket-other-prosecutions-slow/
Indeed, I surmise that an objective study of DHS’s civil, non-criminal enforcement activities would actually show little if any net benefit from leaving U.S. families without one or both parents, taking productive workers out of their jobs, and spreading fear and distrust of local police in ethnic communities. Just how that benefits anyone in the U.S. except Trump and his White Nationalist cronies isn’t apparent to me.
We also should throw in all of the legal time and court time wasted by the DOJ and other Federal prosecutors in tying up the Federal Courts with semi-frivolous litigation to advance their often illegal White Nationalist agenda. If those resources were instead dedicated to getting individuals in Immigration Court represented and improving the quality of Due Process and independence in Immigration Court, we’d be on the way to solving at least one phase of the immigration mess created largely by Congress and the last three Administrations.
For the last two years, DHS Enforcement has been operating largely without any rational enforcement objectives or professional supervision in a Department where management failure, fraud, waste, and abuse are endemic. Some meaningful oversight by the House and some requirement for rational planning, prudent use of taxpayers’ money, and accountability would be most welcome.
PWS
12-15-18
