President-elect Donald Trump’s reaffirmation of his campaign trail vow to immediately deport 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants has roiled communities across the country. Local leaders have attempted to calm their constituents, with authorities in California offering particularly strident opposition. California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León called Trump’s plan “catastrophic” and vowed that the state would “aggressively avail ourselves of any and all tools” to protect the rights of undocumented residents.
Remarks by Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck about his agency not cooperating with any new deportation push garnered the highest praise from the national press and immigrants’ rights advocates.
“We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts. That is not our job, nor will I make it our job,” Beck said on November 14.
The reality of street policing in California is quite different. Police and sheriffs in California — including the LAPD — and across the country have been routinely cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for years to deport people accused of gang ties. Joint federal-local gang task forces targeting transnational gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street were formed during George W. Bush’s presidency as part of Operation Community Shield, and they have continued to operate through Barack Obama’s two terms. Today, the deportation of people accused of gang membership or association is strongly emphasized under the Obama administration’s Priority Enforcement Program, which focuses on identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
Special Agent James Cole during the unveiling of a major expansion of the ICE Cyber Crimes Center on July 22, 2015, in Fairfax, Virginia.
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
In the mid-2000s, ICE created a gang database similar to those used in Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Minnesota, South Carolina, Texas, Washington state, Wisconsin, and Virginia. ICE’s system contains an unknown number of people, but there are more than 250,000 people in California’s and Texas’s gang databases alone, the majority of whom are Latino. These databases are populated with intelligence from street stops and arrests by local police, which is then uploaded and shared between agencies. ICE’s has access to all of them.
There is no accurate tally of how many people are in gang databases around the country, or how many of those people are undocumented. In late October, The Intercept filed a lawsuit over ICE’s refusal to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests for data and documentation of its gang database.
These data sets contain unverified and potentially flawed information derived from field interviews and arrests that may never result in criminal charges or convictions. Earlier this year, California’s state auditor found rampant inaccuracies in the state’s CalGang system, which included dozens of people with insufficient evidence of supposed gang ties.
Peter Bibring, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said the flaws in CalGang’s data heighten the need to restrict ICE’s access to that information. “The system is so error prone that a significant number of people lack any supporting justification for whether they are gang members,” Bibring said. “It’s irresponsible of the state to be using CalGang, let alone handing over information to ICE.”
Remarks last week by Trump’s immigration adviser, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, indicate that the incoming administration is looking at deporting people accused of being in gangs who have not been convicted of a crime. If law enforcement knows an undocumented person is gang affiliated at the time of arrest, Kobach said, “we ought to get him out of the country.”
Despite the glaring problems with unverified gang intelligence being used for deportations, in which there are no rights to court-appointed legal representation or discovery, law enforcement veterans expect no changes from the way gang task forces work with local police under Trump’s presidency.
“I don’t see any changes to the current state of affairs — things will continue just like they are today,” said Wes McBride, a retired sergeant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the head of the California Gang Investigator’s Association.
“I can’t see any real defiance of the federal government because they control the purse strings,” said McBride, adding that he believed the Trump administration would retaliate against any state that refused to cooperate with ICE’s deportation policies.
In recent months, there has been significant pushback by advocacy organizations against joint federal-local immigration raids in Southern California. On April 26, a coalition of 18 community groups sent a letter to Chief Charlie Beck about the LAPD’s cooperation with ICE during a series of raids on “casitas” where gang members allegedly ran gambling and prostitution rings. The raids, which were conducted on the basis of search warrants obtained by the LAPD, resulted in at least two women without prior gang-related arrests or charges being arrested and placed in deportation proceedings.
Since 1979, an LAPD directive called Special Order 40 has barred its officers from detaining or arresting people for the sole purpose of learning about their immigration status. The April 26 letter calls into question how strictly that directive is being followed on a daily basis. “LAPD routinely engages in joint operations with HSI/ERO [Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations, two branches of ICE] that have resulted in ICE and LAPD making collateral arrests, with ICE placing undocumented LA residents in immigration enforcement proceedings, even when the individuals are not charged with any crime,” the letter reads.
“It certainly violates the spirit of Special Order 40 when they’re engaging in these task forces that appear to be designed specifically for the purpose of immigration enforcement,” said Jennie Pasquarella, the director of immigrants’ rights for the American Civil Liberties Union of California.
The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to requests for comment on the department’s participation in ICE task forces or regarding the enforcement of Special Order 40.
Erika Pinheiro, an immigration attorney with the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles, has handled several gang-related deportation cases. Being classified with a gang association does away with any protections for undocumented immigrants established by California lawmakers. “Once police decide you’re a gang member, all your due process protections go away,” Pinheiro said.
Since the November 8 elections, immigrants’ rights organizations have been flooded by people concerned about a potential surge of raids and deportations. Pinheiro said her group had over a thousand people contact them just in the past week.
Despite the palpable panic in some migrant communities and the long-standing distrust of police, Pinheiro is hopeful that the posture of the LAPD’s Chief Beck and state lawmakers will lead to meaningful reforms of local cooperation with immigration officials.
“I’m hopeful that Charlie Beck’s statements mean this non-cooperation will be extended to this population,” said Pinheiro. “However, right now it seems like Special Order 40 doesn’t apply when LAPD is working in these interagency task forces — they’re literally rounding people up with ICE.”
Gang Database == Facebook.
Why is that unreliable?
You say there are a quarter million brown-skinned gangsters just in CA and TX alone? Maybe. But I can show you a couple thousand pink-skinned criminals who inhabit Wall Street and Capital Hill.
Maybe we can get the Browns to invade the Pinks and see what happens; we need to keep our leadership fresh.
What!! They’re deporting illegal immigrant gang members just because the are robbers, thieves, drug dealers, rapists and murders. This outrageous! This has to stop. This must be racism or something.
SO WHAT? All invaders, gangsters or otherwise, need to go back. The US is under attack from an invasionary force from Mexico under the guise of bullcrap. It’s called OCCUPATION. It’s the very same practice that the genocidal israeli’s are doing to Palestine.
The US as suffered 1M avg annual “settlers” from Mexican invasionary force since 1975 – that’s 40,000,000 invaders to take American land and vote into power. Mexico has no intention of stopping the invasion. And if you are stupid enough to believe that this is not an invasion, then perhaps you are smart enough to believe the economic opportunities in the US as a motivator are dis-economic opportunites to get wealth-by-deprivation in mexico by elites there.
There are 250,000,000 and growing persons south of the border looking for a better economic opportunity. There are a handful of elites willing to deprive the population for their economic opportunity. There are a handful of political rulers looking to remove opposition for more power. If you are not smart enough to see the potential tragedy destroying America then you are not smart enough to remain in America.
Be a good person. Relocate your bleeding heart to south of the border and help make the residents of the their country happy to be and stay in their country and show them how to make their own country better.
illegal? Get out of my country.
What tribe gave you permission to invade Turtle Island?
my sentiments about the forked tongue tribe are apparent
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/27/arrests-of-journalists-at-standing-rock-test-the-boundaries-of-the-first-amendment/?comments=1#comment-315911
whiteman reap what whiteman soweth
if you want to play the debt game, then i have a solution – return the plains to the native human beings.
What you’re saying has some merit, but it also has some holes. Making Mexico better would benefit those in the U.S. who don’t like illegal immigrants, and it’s worth paying a little for that, or better yet, paying less for that. Paying less by, say, cutting the subsidies to the automated corporate farms that grow corn and beans so much cheaper than Mexican peasants when the Federal Government pays a big chunk of their bills. Paying less by not mandating that drugstores lock up pseudoephedrine behind the pharmacy counter so that it is cheaper to import meth from foreign cartels than to let American losers blow themselves up making it in soda bottles full of lantern fuel. If the U.S. had half the sense God gave a goose we’d quit paying so damn much to help the foreign cartels have markets for illegal stuff and special privileges to make and import it, and then the people of northern Mexico wouldn’t flee here in terror. And of course, had we shafted the Contras for some of their funding and not helped maintain the crooked gangs that control their state, we wouldn’t have so many Salvadorans sneaking in either.
We ought to do something to make it nicer for illegals to go back home, or at least, not make it quite so much more miserable while they’re there.
i’ll buy that.
I’m gonna have to go with the crowd on this one. I know what it feels like to have “liberals” stand up and defend the right of somebody in the country illegally to not be deported because the claim he is in a gang isn’t well researched. It feels like watching Donald Trump win the election. If we want to watch Donald Trump win another election, we’ll keep spending our political capital on foreign gang members who can’t vote. But if we want to see some kind of bottom to the upcoming middle class wage cuts and austerity measures, we say fuck it. They can take their own damn chances in Latin America; we’re writing them off.
I also think article like these are BS. First illegal emigrants have no rights they broke the law already, now I am against deportation of everyone, but anyone with record got to go. No database is going to be perfect, but when people question it we need to add some numbers. What amount of people can be on it without any links and such. The only think I hear is that database is broken so throw it away and do nothing. People of this country want criminal emigrants to be deported and media needs to get on board with it. Intercept is much better then the rest of the horrible press, but still.
You know, I don’t necessarily agree that people shouldn’t be free to enter and work in whichever country they choose. But this and several other similar articles on the Intercept strike me as odd.
Under current laws in the USA and almost everywhere in the world – if they’re undocumented/illegal immigrants then they are subject to deportation at any time, provided the police aren’t finding out this information through illegal searches/stops (which, obviously they do, and that’s the issue here, not the gang database).
Whether or not they are in a gang database, or whether that gang database is accurate or not, has nothing to do with it.
“protect the rights of undocumented residents”
And specifically what would those “rights” be?
Every policy of CrookdClintons and PresO has been to destroy SA citizens rights so the WSand their B$CEOs can profit and find their only hope for survival is to move north: Haiti, Honduras, Brazil, Mexico…etc. There is never a moment of respite. i agree.
But you do not have rights here JUST AS I AND BH2 have no rogjts there!
You have to go home and fix it.
The right not to be held in a cage indefinitely without representation, even after not committing any criminal acts, for one.
Incarcerating people who have broken the law is not a violation of their “rights”, which are few in any case.
The lawbreaking, of course, is willfully (often repeatedly) entering the country without authorization. This applies equally to “refugees” and “economic migrants”. Pending adjudication, they are confined since they are reasonably presumed to be extreme flight risks (an assumption confirmed by experience). The more who come, the longer it takes. A self-inflicted wound.
If people legally here with green cards can be deported if they merely overstay, it’s safe to say someone who never had a green card or any other visa granting them access and accommodation can also be deported.
As Mr. Obama’s DoJ made very clear to the State of Arizona, the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. States and cities do not. Nor do they have the power of nullification.
Agree, BoA and all the WSCorps need to airlift home asap.
It is an offense to be undocumented.
Human rights. The rights afforded to all mankind.
Granted, if you’re convicted of being an illegal alien and committing other felonies, you should be deported regardless of the gang database. But, until they’re convicted, they have every Constitutional right you and I have. “All men are created equal…”