San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez might have violated a state sanctuary law by transferring an inmate in the local jail system to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to immigration lawyers who reviewed a report from the Sheriff’s Office.
Under SB 54, known as the Values Act, local jails can transfer inmates to ICE only if those individuals have been convicted of certain felonies in the last 15 years or certain misdemeanors in the last five.
The law requires law enforcement agencies that transfer people to ICE to publish annual reports, which is where advocates found the questionable transfer.
San Diego’s 2023 report contains a list of people with convictions for assault, burglary, drunk driving, drug trafficking, sex crimes and one man for murder — all within 15 years.
But one case stood out.
“The person that we’re seeing that was transferred, had a felony conviction that was 21 years old,” said Felicia Gomez, a senior policy advocate for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “That falls outside the parameters.”
The case involved a man who was convicted of assault in 2002. Then, in late 2022, he was picked up for vandalism. He was transferred to ICE a month later.
Advocates say this is an example of an immigrant being punished twice for the same crime.
“That person had already served their time,” Gomez said. “Why do they continue to be punished for that very same conviction that happened 21 years ago?”
The Values Act doesn’t require local agencies to transfer inmates with criminal convictions, it merely allows it.
A number of counties, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa, have stopped all voluntary transfers and only comply when ICE presents a federal warrant signed by a judge.
Others make a concerted effort to work with ICE. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office, for example, transferred 220 inmates in 2023 — the most in the state. San Diego, meanwhile, transferred a total of 25 inmates that year.
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Gomez and other advocates have spent years asking Martinez to stop the practice in San Diego.
“It’s a larger argument as to why the Sheriff’s Department shouldn’t be working with ICE in the first place because of how complicated some of these things are,” Gomez said.
At the end of January, KPBS asked Martinez for an interview. Her team scheduled — and then cancelled — two interviews in February. KPBS made a third attempt to reschedule but the Sheriff’s Office did not respond.
But Martienz has been questioned about these issues during annual public forums, which are mandated by SB 54.
At the 2024 forum in San Diego, Clint Carney of Survivors of Torture in San Diego talked about the impact ICE transfers have on police-community relations.
“When colluding with ICE occurs, it eliminates any chance of our clients ever trusting any law enforcement officer,” Carney said.
Other advocates reminded Martinez that ICE transfers are voluntary and pointed to the jurisdictions that had ended them. Martinez pushed back.
“Comparing our agency to other sheriff jurisdictions like Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Humboldt, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Joaquin and others is just not realistic,” she said. “Other counties do not have proximity to the border, which reduces the number of people in their custody who might qualify under state law for transfer.”
However, data show that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office transferred more people to ICE than San Diego before stopping in 2021.
At the time, Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva issued a statement defending his decision.
“There is no greater threat to public safety than a million undocumented immigrants who are afraid to report a crime out of fear of deportation and have their families torn apart,” the statement read.
Martinez also said during the 2024 forum that she has broad support from victims’ families to continue ICE transfers.
She added that the transfers help prevent recidivism, saying that 10 of the 25 people transferred in 2023 were in custody for similar crimes they had committed in the past.
“As I mentioned last year, as a sheriff, I can legally prevent these offenders from revictimizing our communities and I will,” she said.
Beyond the 2023 case, KPBS found other questionable transfers.
In 2022, the San Diego Sheriff’s Office transferred a man with a drunk driving conviction from 30 years ago. In 2020, deputies transferred a man with a theft conviction from 20 years ago. Both cases were included in the Sheriff’s annual reports.
“This is one more example of why the San Diego Sheriff’s Office should cease all collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security (ICE’s parent agency),” said Monika Langarica, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA.
Langarica believes these transfers show inequities in California’s criminal justice system, which is something the state sanctuary laws sought to address.
“That disparity between the treatment of citizens and noncitizens in the exact same criminal legal system is what these policies aim to mitigate,” she said.
San Diego County has scheduled this year's forum on SB 54 for April 22.
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