Ending The Prison-To-Deportation Pipeline
Photo credit: Charles Reed/AP
California funnels thousands of prisoners to immigration authorities each year — but a groundbreaking new bill aims to change that.
by PIPER FRENCH
In September 2020, after spending 29 years in California prisons, Carlos Muñoz won parole. There was a celebration planned at his nephew’s house in Burbank; his family was coming from all over.
When he was 17, Muñoz had been found guilty of a gang killing, despite the fact that he said he hadn’t done it and eight people corroborated his alibi. The damning evidence: two statements from witnesses who both recanted before the trial.
Convicted of second-degree murder, Muñoz had grown up inside prison: got his GED, got his associate degree, became a certified alcohol and drug abuse counselor and a mentor to the men around him. He sorted through the violence of his youth and its lasting trauma. Growing with a single mother on Hollywood Boulevard in the ’80s and ’90s, gang conflict had felt inescapable. At 17, Muñoz thought the system that put him away was probably right to do so. Over time, he realized that he didn’t actually believe in that system anymore, nor its ability to dictate the course of his life.
The parole board had assured Muñoz that he was going home to his family. But a few days before his release date, Muñoz learned that he was going to be handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) instead. Though Muñoz had lived almost his entire life in California, he was born in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, and his conviction had stripped him of his permanent residency. After spending decades in prison, he no longer had the legal right to remain in the U.S.
In theory, such transfers weren't supposed to happen. In 2017, California became one of a handful of states to pass sanctuary laws prohibiting law enforcement cooperation with ICE. But a bitter compromise added an exemption for immigrants in the state prison system or convicted of any of 800 crimes. Since then, roughly 3,000 people have been transferred from California’s prisons and jails to ICE custody each year.
Activists and lawmakers in the state are now trying to end that loophole with a new bill called the VISION (Voiding Inequality and Seeking Inclusion for Our Immigrant Neighbors) Act. If passed and signed into law, it would make California one of the first states in the nation to comprehensively prohibit cooperation between law enforcement and ICE. Alongside similar bills that recently cleared the Illinois and Oregon legislatures and passed in Washington, D.C., it could provide a model for uncoupling immigration enforcement from the criminal legal system nationally.
But the VISION Act could face opposition, including from California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), and it will have to overcome the “good immigrant/bad immigrant” dichotomy that has animated so much of U.S. immigration policy — and led Democrats to fail their commitments to both immigration justice and prison reform time and time again.
In the meantime, immigrants in the criminal legal system like Muñoz remain vulnerable.
For six months, Muñoz sat in ICE detention, waiting to be deported. “It was devastating,” he told The Daily Poster. “To me, it was like: ‘What more can I do? What more do I owe you?’”
“There Are Loopholes You Can Exploit”
“Going back to the middle of the 1980s, Congress has fairly consistently enacted a series of laws that have expanded the number and type of crimes that can result in forced removal from the United States for anyone who is not a U.S. citizen,” said César García Hernández, an expert on immigration and criminal law, adding that those impacted included both lawful permanent residents and undocumented immigrants.
Immigration laws that targeted so-called “criminal aliens,” as the US government has put it, were not only indicative of the ‘tough-on-crime’ mindset dominating U.S. politics at the time, García Hernández told The Daily Poster. In many cases, he said, the same sets of laws produced mass incarceration and led to a vastly expanded immigration and deportation system.
“These are the same laws that expanded the death penalty for federal crimes, that gave us the 100-to-1 crack cocaine sentencing disparity that affected generations of primarily young black men,” García Hernández said.
In California, those laws continue to affect an untold number of families ― especially families of color. Home to 25 percent of the nation’s immigrants ― and more non-citizens than the populations of at least 27 US states ― the state is also the progenitor of some of the nation’s harshest crime laws.
Angela Chan, policy director and senior staff attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, says most of her organization’s immigration clients have experienced ICE transfers. Many are resettled refugees from Southeast Asia who came to the U.S. as children.
Asian Law Caucus has been fighting to end law enforcement collaboration with ICE for years as part of the ICE out of California coalition ― but such efforts were often stymied by the lingering pressures of the tough-on-crime era. The Trust Act, passed in 2013, limited local and state law enforcement ability to hold immigrants for ICE, but exempted people convicted of certain crimes.
Finally, in 2016, a more comprehensive solution seemed imminent.
That year, just after Trump’s election, lawmakers and advocates brought the California Values Act, colloquially known as California’s “sanctuary state” law, before the state legislature. Originally, that bill also protected all immigrants from information sharing between police and immigration enforcement. Then the lobby arms of law enforcement and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) got involved.
In a legislature with an ironclad Democratic supermajority, police unions train their eye on the people who matter: conservative Democrats. The California legislature has a lot of them.
“CDCR and the Sheriffs Association and the Police Chiefs Association got oppositional lobbying underway, and they were really pushing on moderate Democrats to poke holes in the bill,” said Chan. It worked: amendments left immigrants convicted of any of a long list of crimes vulnerable to transfers, and exempted the state prison system entirely from the ban on information sharing.