0 inmates were turned over to ICE

Law enforcement has not turned anyone over to federal immigration authorities in 2020 through May, a Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office captain said Tuesday.

The office received one detainer request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. With a “detainer,” the federal agency asks the county to hold an inmate suspected of being an undocumented immigrant subject to deportation.

Capt. Duane Christian of the Sheriff’s Office said the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has limited the number of jail bookings, which in turn has limited the number of ICE inquiries.

At Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, Christian defended

the ordinance after Fifth District Humboldt County Supervisor Steve Madrone, asked law enforcement if the ordinance had actually posed material problems for the Sheriff’s Office — like the sheriff had said it would — when so few people had actually been turned over to ICE.

“There are individuals who have come into custody that do have the proper convictions … that have since been released because we cannot turn them over to ICE based on some of these statutes, nor even communicate with ICE to facilitate that,” Christian said.

Sheriff William Honsal, who had been a vocal critic of the sanctuary immigration ordinance before it was passed by voters in 2018, said he still opposed the law, saying it limited how much the Sheriff’s Office can keep track of “serious and violent” offenders in the community.

Before the ordinance passed as Measure K in 2018, Honsal made the rounds criticizing the proposed law as detrimental to his office’s work.

Honsal and the Board of Supervisors, including current chair Estelle Fennell, worried aloud that the ordinance would cost far too much in staff time. Those cost projections would later turn out to be wildly inaccurate.

But both Fennell and 1st District Supervisor Rex Bohn supported Honsal’s opposition to the law at Tuesday’s meeting, saying that Measure K would allow certain criminals back into the community.

“It basically took a tool out of the sheriff’s tool belt — for hardened criminals, not for nonviolent criminals,” Bohn said.

The supervisor, who has admitted to making a racist joke in the past about Mexicans, earned criticism and pushback during public comment, including from members of the activist group Centro del Pueblo.

“I’m disappointed, after all this time of a long campaign and the vote of the people, (that) there is still doubting of these tools,” said organizer Brenda Perez. “(Criminals) are not a consequence of Measure K; this is because of a failure of the system of justice.”

“For Supervisor Rex, we have no criminals so stop making the relationship between immigration and criminality. How many times are we going to hear that?” Perez added. “In fact, what we did is stop the police from harming families, (sending) them to ICE.”

The immigration advocates also criticized the sheriff office’s use of Lexipol, a company that provides law enforcement with training and equipment, to deal with undocumented immigrants suspected of crime.”

Earlier, Honsal had defended Lexipol, calling it a “solid platform for our policies and procedures.” But the supervisors were unable to discuss Lexipol at length after the board’s legal counsel suggested it would take the discussion too far afield.