Sanctuary State: California Bars Local Law Enforcement from Detaining Illegal Aliens for Minor Convictions

It's not just the City of San Francisco. The entire State of California is one massive illegal immigration sanctuary.

Illegal aliens can't be detained after their release date at the local level.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Fatal shooting of S.F. woman reveals disconnect between ICE, local police; 5-time deportee charged":

At the root of the tragedy is the uneasy relationship between immigration authorities and local law enforcement in many parts of the country — but most notably in California and perhaps nowhere more so than in the Bay Area.

Eager to encourage immigrants who are in the country illegally to trust the criminal justice system and report crimes without fear that police will hand them off for deportation, San Francisco honors federal requests that immigrants be held for pickup only if their current crime and earlier conviction meet thresholds spelled out in a 2013 city ordinance.

Sanchez didn't meet those. His past crimes were too old, and the case he was booked on had evaporated.

Handed over to the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department in March on a bench warrant for a 20-year-old marijuana sales case, he was cut loose when prosecutors declined to charge him.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had lodged an "immigration detainer" with the Sheriff's Department asking to be "notified prior to his release," but "the detainer was not honored," ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said in a statement.

California's Trust Act, which went into effect in January 2014, bars local law enforcement from detaining defendants with most minor convictions past their release dates in order to hand them over to ICE, but it allows jurisdictions to turn over people such as Sanchez with past felony convictions.

San Francisco, however, is among a number of local governments — including Santa Clara and Alameda counties — with policies that are more protective of potentially deportable immigrants than the Trust Act.

Although the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department follows the Trust Act, for example, the Los Angeles Police Department has not honored an ICE request since mid-2014 "unless there is a warrant or other legal requirement to do so," LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Monday.

The issue was complicated further when a federal court in Oregon ruled in April 2014 that Clackamas County had violated a plaintiff's 4th Amendment rights by holding her for immigration authorities beyond her release date. A slew of jurisdictions that had been complying with the detainer requests soon stopped doing so.

Sanchez's case is among more than 10,000 in California and 17,000 nationwide since January 2014 in which an ICE request that an immigrant in the country illegally be detained for pickup was declined or ignored, ICE officials said...

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