Gov. Brown Should Sign the Trust Act

NEW YORK TIMES (Blog) 

By Lawrence Downes

September 26, 2012

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/gov-brown-should-sign-the-trust-act/

Gov. Jerry Brown of California has until this weekend to sign the Trust Act, a bill that seeks to restore concern for public safety and sensible law-enforcement to an immigration system that has strayed from those ideals.

The bill requires state and local authorities to be more prudent when the federal government wants to use their jails as immigration holding cells.

Presently, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement runs inmates’ fingerprints through its databases and finds someone it believes is deportable, it often asks local authorities to hold that person to be picked up for deportation. Most police departments try to comply, though doing so is voluntary.

Under California’s bill, local police would agree to hold inmates for ICE only if they have been convicted or charged with a serious or violent felony. If the inmates are noncriminals or minor offenders who would otherwise be let go, they would not be turned over to ICE.

As the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, said: “We want police to distinguish between the woman selling tamales and the gang member who has a record.”

In theory this is not a problem for ICE, which supposedly shares Mr. Ammiano’s priorities. Its officials insist that their main focus is catching “the worst of the worst” — dangerous and violent felons, not peaceable violators of civil immigration laws. In reality, immigration has become a numbers game of mounting arrests and deportations. The Obama administration is deporting 400,000 people a year, tens of thousands of whom have no criminal records or only minor convictions.

The Trust Act is important. It’s not, by itself, going to solve a grossly dysfunctional national immigration system. It’s just one state trying to be level-headed and proportionate about who gets deported, which families get split up, and which policing strategies are smartest, most effective and most humane.

Other states like Arizona and Alabama are doing the opposite, fighting to force their cops and sheriff’s deputies to join the federal crackdown through expanded police-state tactics and racial profiling. Mr. Brown should listen to the voices of the immigrants, civil-rights advocates, police chiefs and sheriffs, local elected officials, members of Congress, Catholic bishops and other religious leaders who have implored him to lead California out of that wilderness. He should sign the Trust Act.