Sanctuary in Sacramento? President Trump’s deportation agenda pits local politicians against their sheriff

Pablo Reyes Morales has been training for the day when immigration agents come to take him.

The 26-year-old Sacramento resident and activist is an undocumented immigrant and “Dreamer” who traveled to the United States as a minor, after his dad lost a good insurance job in Mexico and brought the family here on a tourism visa that ultimately expired.

In that time, Morales has watched immigration agents raid a Florida Wal-Mart under President George W. Bush, learned during a road trip to Los Angeles that undocumented minors like him would be shielded from deportation under President Barack Obama, and is now preparing fellow Sacramento immigrants for expanded deportation efforts under President Donald Trump. That means memorizing attorneys’ names, drilling important phone numbers and rehearsing what to say when federal immigration officers try to enter the home or take one of them into custody.

“I am not comfortable in any way,” Morales said. “Every day, every second, anything can happen.”

Such is life under President Donald Trump, whose January 25 executive orders ramping up immigration enforcement are now taking shape. Implementation guidelines released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security envision “a mass deportation blueprint,” in the words of Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center.

Here in Sacramento County, local politicians have echoed their statewide counterparts in pledging to obstruct Trump’s immigration crackdown, but they are still figuring out what form those efforts will take. Meanwhile, a philosophical wild card is in their midst, in the form of Sheriff Scott Jones, who supported strict border enforcement as an unsuccessful congressional candidate last year and whose agency stands to rake in the dough off the Trump administration’s policies.

Since 2000, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department has sublet space at its jail facilities to the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants being processed for removal. The department’s contract with Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm, also known as ICE, was last renewed in 2013 for approximately $30 million over a five-year term.

Local politicians have declared Sacramento a de facto sanctuary zone for undocumented immigrants who otherwise obey the law, but the Republican sheriff has other ideas. A sheriff’s spokesman referred questions about the contract to ICE, but Jones’ public statements and an SN&R review of booking logs reveal the sheriff remains a strong ally of Trump’s rising immigration force.

After a year of uncertainty over the future of the sheriff’s relationship with ICE, the two sides appear to be working closely once again.

The last formal update about the ICE contract came a year ago, when the sheriff’s department filed a January 26, 2016, appropriations request with the board of supervisors asking to use $1.7 million from its detainee housing contract to help fund 22 new patrol hires. The request, attributed to Jones, noted continuing uncertainty about the future of the partnership with ICE.

“ICE has indicated that they will withdraw inmates from our facility, but have not given us a timeline for doing so,” the request stated.

While the sheriff’s department then expected a total of $4 million in annual revenue from ICE by the end of that fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2016, the appropriations request stated that ICE hadn’t yet indicated whether it would continue subletting a portion of the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center in Elk Grove for its detainees.

That message arrived a month after SN&R reported allegations of deplorable housing conditions in 20 detainee letters obtained by this newspaper. (Read “Detention hell,” News, December 31, 2015.)

The current contract is due to expire next year unless it’s renewed, and neither side is saying whether that will happen.

But the relationship seems to have rebounded since that appropriations request was issued more than a year ago, with the Elk Grove jail seeing an influx of immigration detainees in recent weeks.

Of the 123 detainee transports that occurred through February 14 of this year, 70 (57 percent) happened between February 6-13, when ICE acknowledged performing a five-day enforcement operation that swept up hundreds of foreign nationals around the country, including 161 people across Southern California.

But sheriff’s Sgt. Tony Turnbull says much of the increased activity was due to flooding at the Yuba County Jail, which has its own detention contract with ICE. On February 13, booking records show, 42 detainees were transported from Yuba City, where the county’s jail is located, to RCCC for ICE housing.

“This put our ICE count to 200,” Turnbull wrote in an email on Tuesday. “Prior to this influx, our population was at 149. The ICE population is now back to 167 as of today due to releases. There are still detainees that will be moved back to Yuba County currently housed with us.”

At a rate of $100 a day per detainee, the sheriff’s department stood to profit handsomely from the weather-caused chaos.

Unlike the sheriff, local politicians have pledged to stand up to the Trump administration’s indiscriminate crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

When Trump first signed the immigration executive order last month, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg blasted the order as both “an unconscionable threat” to public safety and as “a cowardly, reckless and inhumane act” that the city would combat alongside other cities.

One of Steinberg’s first moves was to appoint District 6 Councilman Eric Guerra to a new “safe haven” task force that met for the first time last week. A district representative, Alejandro Cabrera, said the task force is working with numerous community-based organizations to figure out how the city should respond to potential incursions from federal immigration forces, including a possible lawsuit.

Cabrera said city officials are in contact with the Mexican Consulate and McGeorge School of Law about providing legal representation and resources to people held for deportation. This includes preparing for when families are inevitably broken up—by asking the consulate to help locate relatives that can take custody of U.S.-born children when their foreign-born parents are taken away.

The task force and its partners, Cabrera added, are in the beginning stages of “figuring out how best we protect our residents.

“At this point, we’re trying to hear back from our community-based organizations … to better assess what the city can do,” he said.

Cabrera also noted that interim police Chief Brian Louie has been outspoken in saying his officers would not check people’s immigration status. But Cabrera also acknowledged that once city police officers transfer custody over to sheriff’s deputies working at the jail, “they lose all control.”

Indeed, the sheriff has rejected the notion that Sacramento is a true “sanctuary county.” In a statement released the day Trump inked his immigration order, Jones said that, while sheriff’s personnel don’t conduct immigration sweeps or checkpoints, the department does honor ICE detainers on undocumented inmates “for tracking and statistical purposes,” and allows ICE agents unfettered access to jail inmates “so they can carry out their mission.”

“ICE agents are regularly inside our facilities for this purpose,” Jones’ statement continued.

Immigrant advocacy groups and attorneys have long complained that ICE agents regularly pressure or mislead noncitizens into signing voluntary deportation orders.

The twice-elected Jones is somewhat beholden to the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, which controls his department’s budget, but the board has remained mum on this topic, except to rubber-stamp the sheriff’s detention contract the two times it has come before them.

Supervisors Phil Serna and Patrick Kennedy, who were critical of the sheriff’s initial support of Trump when both men were candidates for higher office, didn’t make themselves available for comment.

Cabrera acknowledged the city had a difficult task ahead, in preparing for the actions of an unpredictable administration and a sheriff’s department it has no jurisdiction over. “Even the administration itself is having a hard time figuring out how to implement its own policies,” he said.

That action plan became a little clearer on Monday, when Homeland Security released two memos that envision a mass deportation dragnet for an estimated 11 million undocumented.

Along with hiring 10,000 additional border agents and erecting a southern border wall—estimated to cost $21.6 billion and take years to build—the draft guidelines greatly expand who would be prioritized for deportation and how quickly they can be removed, from convicted felons under the Obama administration to essentially anyone who can’t document their legal right to be in the country.

To some extent, a shift in priorities can already be seen locally.

Of the 123 detainees recently brought to the Elk Grove jail for ICE housing, SN&R was able to locate additional jail and court records for 19 who previously resided in Sacramento.

Ten had no local criminal history, four spent some time in jail after misdemeanor vehicle-related convictions, two spent time in prison for felony convictions, one got jail time for a second-degree felony back in 2002 and two were facing unresolved misdemeanor charges when they were taken into ICE custody.

In a conference call with reporters, immigration attorneys and advocates pointed to the Trump administration’s expansion of expedited removal as one of the most troubling aspects. The once-limited policy allowed for deportation without a hearing before a federal immigration judge for individuals caught near the border within 14 days. Under Kelly’s new guidelines, expedited removal could apply to anyone who is arrested anywhere in the United States and can’t prove that they’ve been in the country at least two years.

Hincapié called the new guidelines “breathtaking in scope” and a “radical departure” from both the Obama and Bush administrations. She also predicted they would push immigrant families underground, making them afraid to send their children to school, seek medical care or come forward when they are the victims of crime.

Morales didn’t learn he was undocumented until he tried to join the U.S. Navy and a recruitment officer in Florida sent the then-teenager away with a warning. Morales, who attended monastery school as a child in Mexico with notions of being a priest, says he wanted to enlist as soon as he arrived in America. It was the Navy commercials that swayed him, the ones showing crisply-attired, squared-away sailors.

“The commercials were all about helping people, and I was all about that,” Morales said.

Instead, Morales tried to apply for college, but couldn’t afford the international student tuition rates he’d have to pay, so he picked oranges in Florida and peaches and nectarines in the Central Valley until his social activism evolved into a career.

It was one early morning in 2012, when Morales and some friends were driving to Los Angeles to protest deportations, that he learned Obama was going to approve Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, a discretionary category to prevent removal proceedings and authorize the employment of undocumented individuals brought to the country as children. The action officially made Morales a “Dreamer.”

“What was going to be a protest turned out to be a protest-slash-celebration, because we knew that wasn’t the last step,” Morales recalled Tuesday.

If anything, Morales says, Trump has proven just how inaugural that step was.