Free Republic

POLITICAL VALUES     The California Assembly is expected to pass State Bill 54, which would take statewide 'sanctuary' policies on immigrants who are in the US illegally. As loud as the calls for and against these laws have become, hard data on the impact they've had at the local level is still scarce. LOS ANGELES AND OAKLAND, CALIF. —California is one step closer to calling itself a “sanctuary state.” On Monday Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and state Senate leader Kevin De León struck a deal on Senate Bill 54, or the California Values Act, making the state potentially the...

Jury selection is expected to begin in the Kate Steinle murder case. Jose Ines Garcia-Zarate is expected back in court later today. He's charged with shooting and killing Steinle at a San Francisco Pier. Last week, the federal agent whose stolen gun was used in the shooting testified in a pre-trial hearing. The judge decided what questions can and cannot be asked of the agent during the trial.

The killing of a Santa Rosa woman by an undocumented immigrant two weeks ago has exposed a constitutional feud between federal and county governments over the detention of immigrants at the Sonoma County Jail. The dispute stems from the release of a Guatemalan national, Nery Israel Estrada- Margos, 38, who bailed out of the jail Aug. 3, a day after being booked on domestic battery charges. While in custody, Estrada- Margos’ fingerprints matched those in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement database. The federal agency sent an immigration detainer request to jail officials, asking them to hold Estrada-Margos for up to...

When Santa Rosa police officers jailed a man in early August for allegedly abusing his girlfriend, they worried the violence might escalate and obtained an emergency order barring him from contacting the woman. But the man, Nery Israel Estrada Margos, faced a larger impediment to seeing his girlfriend. Federal immigration agents wanted to take custody of him and deport him to his native Guatemala. Nevertheless, Estrada Margos was released the day after his arrest when he posted bail. He soon returned to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend of nine months, Veronica Cabrera Ramirez. And on Aug. 18, authorities...

Ever since the Attorney General made it crystal clear that President Trump really wasn’t kidding when he said he would cut off DoJ funding to sanctuary cities, the response has been frantic. More than a dozen cities and counties, along with the state of California, have begun legal action challenging the right of the federal government to determine what the qualifications are to receive such grant money. Most of them will take quite a while to sort out, but the City of Richmond, California was one of the first out of the gate and managed to get their case...

The Trump administration is working with like-minded sheriffs from around the country on a plan to channel undocumented immigrants from local jails into federal detention, according to several sheriffs involved in the discussions. If it succeeds, it could vastly expand the dragnet that has already begun to transform immigration enforcement in the United States. The plan is intended to circumvent court decisions that have thus far limited the role of local law enforcement in immigration. It involves a legal move regarding detainers, which are requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to local sheriffs or police departments to hold people who...

On Wednesday in Miami, Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the recent decision of Miami-Dade County to end its sanctuary policy. At the same time, he criticized Chicago’s sanctuary policy and its filing of a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department in the wake of the Department’s denial of federal law enforcement grants to sanctuary jurisdictions. It’s been a long time coming. Sanctuary cities didn’t start in the 2010s. They didn’t start in the 2000s either. They started in the 1980s, with the most notorious case being San Francisco, which enacted its “City and County of Refuge” Ordinance in 1989. That...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 400 people in an operation targeting undocumented parents and guardians who allegedly paid smugglers to bring their children to the U.S., putting them in grave danger. An ICE spokesman tells NPR the domestic phase of its Human Smuggling Disruption Initiative concluded on Friday. He said the "surge initiative" will now shift its focus to the transnational smuggling organizations that bring the children to the U.S.-Mexico border. The operation, which uses immigrant children to target their sponsors in the U.S., has been controversial. Immigrant advocates complain it is hampering efforts to reunite families....

Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, served a federal search warrant related to sex trafficking of minors in West Oakland Wednesday morning, according to police. The operation began around 6:30 a.m. in the 700 block of 27th Street near West Street. Law enforcement officers were at the scene for hours. "HSI is conducting a criminal investigation, not a civil immigration or deportation action," Oakland police spokeswoman Officer Johnna Watson said in a statement. (Snip) The activist organization By Any Means Necessary is calling for an emergency protest this evening near the scene of the...

WASHINGTON — Before President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies took effect early this year, thousands of undocumented residents were given a break from being deported. Government immigration officials would hold off if the illegal immigrants were married to American citizens or longtime residents of the U.S., gainfully employed and had committed no crime other than being in the country illegally. It was, said immigration lawyer Heather Prendegast of Cleveland, the “government’s attempt to be nice.” The cordiality ended when Trump officials instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to get tough on illegal immigration, according to a study by the...

The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit Friday charging that the Trump administration is wrongly accusing young illegal immigrants of gang affiliations as a way to short-circuit their rights and force them into speedy deportations. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in California, opens yet another legal front against President Trump’s goal of stepped-up immigration enforcement, with advocates hoping to blunt a new effort by Homeland Security to find and deport some of the Central Americans who jumped the border during the Obama era. Immigrant-rights advocates said the government has started to fabricate broad accusations of gang membership or...

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein called Thursday for the federal government to reverse the deportation of an Oakland nurse and her husband, saying their removal after more than two decades in the country revealed the “cruel and arbitrary nature” of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Responding to a front-page Chronicle story about the couple — who plan to leave for Mexico on Tuesday with their 12-year-old son, while leaving behind three older daughters who have legal status — Feinstein’s office set up a meeting Thursday between the California Democrat and the family to discuss their plight. “These are the kind...

Eighteen Pittsburgh SWAT officers were sickened by suspected fentanyl while assisting federal officials on a series of raids in the West End of the city Wednesday morning, authorities said. Residents awoke to a large law enforcement presence as Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State police assisted Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security investigators and U.S. Postal Inspectors with serving search warrants and making arrests at three separate locations in Elliott, said U.S. Attorney's Office spokeswoman Margaret Philbin. ICE was the lead agency on the raids at two houses on Lakewood Street and one on Bond Street as part of an ongoing drug...

Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) officers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency arrested 32 criminal aliens previously convicted of sex crimes in the sanctuary jurisdiction of Long Island, New York. The arrests came during Operation SOAR (Sex Offender Alien Removal), a 10-day operation that ended on August 3. ERO officers rounded up 32 criminal aliens previously convicted of sex crimes including sexual abuse, sexual assault on young children, rape, child endangerment, and promoting sexual performance of a child. The previously convicted are reported to have illegally entered the U.S. from Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India,...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, implemented under U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, threaten the number of undocumented immigrants who are willing to take advantage of government benefits.Fewer undocumented families have come forward to claim Los Angeles County-funded welfare, which is expected to result in a projected decrease of $200 million over 2016. Trump immigration policies have contributed to a reduction in the number of undocumented people claiming welfare payments, since more people are being napped by ICE. In late April the nationwide figure indicated a hike of 35 percent, before over 200 people being arrested – over a five-day...

California Labor Commissioner Julie Su has ordered state employees to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from entering the department’s offices without a warrant. According to the Sacramento Bee, Su issued the directive last month, ostensibly to protect illegal aliens reporting employee abuse at the hands of employers. One Democrat Assemblyman from San Francisco is pushing it one step, further the Bee reports, proposing a law to limit ICE accesses to workplaces: “The atmosphere of fear created by Trump and ICE’s expanded dragnet hurt all California workers,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, who sponsored the bill that would...

California’s top labor law enforcer wants federal immigration agents to stay away from offices where state investigators weigh claims about underpaid employees and workplace retaliation. Those contacts with immigration officers dovetail with a surge in complaints from California workers about employers threatening to have them deported. Last year, Su’s office in the Department of Industrial Relations investigated 14 complaints from workers who claimed their employers threatened them with immigration enforcement. So far this year, the department has opened 58 immigration-based retaliation cases, Su said. She said the presence of immigration officers in state offices could disrupt the enforcement of labor...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — 33 people were arrested in a recent four-day operation in West Michigan by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In a press release put out early Friday, the agency says the operation was meant to target “criminal aliens, illegal re-entrants and immigration violators.” They say that among the 33 taken into custody, 24 of them had prior criminal convictions. The operation took place this week across West Michigan. The arrests span individuals from four different countries: Mexico (22 arrested), Guatemala (7 arrested), El Salvador (3 arrested) and Liberia. Rebecca Adduci, the ICE Enforcement and Removal...

In an escalation of local law enforcement agencies' participation in immigration enforcement, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency on Monday announced it had struck 18 new partnerships with sheriff's departments in Texas. The announcement is a notable development in the Trump administration's efforts to ramp up its deportation apparatus, following memos from the Department of Homeland Security in February announcing that it would expand a controversial ICE program that had largely fallen into disuse under the Obama administration. ICE's 287(g) program establishes agreements with local law enforcement agencies, allowing them to deputize officers as immigration agents and enforce federal...

There has been shift in the language that the U.S. Department of Justice is using in its press releases, and it’s not sitting well with some. The DOJ, under the leadership of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has now begun using the term “illegal aliens” to refer to immigrants who do not have the proper paperwork to be in the United States. Advocates for immigration reform contend that the term “illegal” is a “racial slur” and believe it is dehumanizing. Instead, they prefer if the term “undocumented immigrant” is used. “They’re using a legally inaccurate term that’s deployed to unfairly label...