Sanctuary bill:
Five undecided Assembly Democrats pressured in ad campaign.
SACRAMENTO — Five state Assembly Democrats who are undecided on a bill to create a statewide sanctuary policy are seeing their faces on full-page newspaper ads that call them out for their reluctance to take a stand on the Trump administration’s “cruel and out-of-control deportation machine.”
The ads are part of a campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union of Sacramento, Planned Parenthood of California, immigrant rights groups and other supporters that are pressuring lawmakers to vote for the bill to bar law enforcement across the state from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
SB54 passed the Senate in April on a strictly partisan vote with all 27 Democrats voting in favor of the bill. But there are no guarantees the bill will get the majority vote it needs to pass in the more moderate Assembly. It passed two Assembly committees and now faces a third before it could head for a floor vote in the coming weeks.
The Democrats targeted in newspaper ads that ran over the weekend include one from the Bay Area: Tim Grayson of Concord. The others are Bakersfield’s Rudy Salas, Jacqui Irwin of Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), Sabrina Cervantes of Corona (Riverside County) and Al Muratsuchi of Torrance (Los Angeles County). The members either are considered moderate Democrats or represent districts with large Republican bases.
“There are a lot of people who care about this bill,” said Natasha Minsker, director of the ACLU Sacramento office, which helped coordinate the campaign targeting undecided Democrats.
“We are pushing lawmakers to make a commitment to voting yes.”
The ads speak directly to each of the five lawmakers, saying Californians are counting on them to “stand up to those who target our communities,” while giving a brief overview of the bill, which is called the California Values Act.
Spokesmen for Cervantes and Salas said the Assembly members had not taken a position on the bill yet. Efforts to reach Grayson, Irwin and Muratsuchi were unsuccessful.
SB54, by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, would prohibit law enforcement officers from carrying out federal immigration laws, such as helping Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents with arresting, detaining or investigating a person for entering the country illegally. Such protections would not be extended to people living in the country illegally who have been convicted of serious or violent crimes, but law enforcement groups say that exemption still leaves out many offenses.
Gov. Jerry Brown, who usually does not comment on pending legislation, told moderator Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this month that further changes to the bill are needed, and that “we're having discussions with the author.”
The bill expands on policies already in place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland and hundreds of other jurisdictions across the country where local governments have said they want to protect the public by ensuring their undocumented communities do not fear deportation when reporting crimes.
De León introduced the bill in response to the Trump administration hardening the country’s policies on illegal immigration, which includes beefing up border security and immigration enforcement. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has threatened to withhold public safety grants from sanctuary cities unless they agree to give federal immigration officials access to their local jails to interrogate suspects and provide 48 hours notice before releasing people wanted for questioning.
On Monday, the state and the city of San Francisco announced lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Justice over the federal government’s plans to withhold the public safety grants.
“The administration’s xenophobic immigration policies are built on the cynical and false premise that immigrants are primarily criminals. The opposite is true,” de León said during an Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing last month. “Sanctuary counties are in fact safer and better off economically than nonsanctuary counties.”
Republican lawmakers have uniformly opposed the bill so far, saying Democrats are putting Californians in danger by allowing criminals to remain in the state, while putting the state at risk of losing billions in federal funding. The bill has support from some law enforcement officials, but some statewide associations, including the California Police Chiefs Association and the California State Sheriffs’ Association, oppose it.
“We believe this bill provides sanctuary to criminals and it endangers the public,” Santa Clara County Sheriff Bill Brown, the president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association, told lawmakers last month.
Lawmakers return from summer recess on Monday and have until Sept. 15 to pass bills before the end of session.