Attorneys say Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims has deceived the public about her office’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Two civil rights attorneys — one with the Asian Americans Advancing Justice and another with the American Civil Liberties Union — told The Bee that Mims has under-reported the number of immigrants transferred from Fresno County to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a potential violation of California’s so-called “sanctuary state” laws.

Since 2018, the California Values Act, more commonly known as the sanctuary state law, has limited local-level law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE. Among other provisions, the law prohibits transferring people to ICE without a warrant or probable cause to suspect serious or violent crimes. It also requires local agencies to publicly report the number of people transferred to ICE each year.

The dispute centers around 102 immigrants who went from the custody of the Fresno Sheriff’s Office to ICE custody in the federal fiscal year 2018. The arrest numbers were obtained from ICE by The Bee through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Mims said her office doesn’t keep track of the number of arrests ICE makes within Sheriff’s Office facilities, so she couldn’t comment on the specific numbers. However, she did say, in general, most cases involve people who are released from the Fresno County jail and then immediately re-arrested by ICE agents inside Sheriff’s Office facilities.

Attorneys who spoke with The Bee said Mims should’ve recorded those cases as transfers to ICE, not arrests. Characterizing transfers as re-arrests, critics say, amounts to playing word games that mislead the public and violate the sanctuary law.

However, in written comments to The Bee, Mims pushed back against the criticism, saying her office has followed the law.

According to California Justice Department data, the Fresno Sheriff’s Office transferred a total of four immigrants into ICE custody in the 2018 calendar year.

Attorneys said the discrepancies between 102 cases versus four are evidence of Mims blurring the lines to buck against a controversial immigration law she doesn’t support.

“Those are absolutely transfers,” said Angela Chan, policy director and senior staff attorney overseeing the criminal justice reform program at the Asian Americans Advancing Justice -Asian Law Caucus.

Chan said recording the 102 cases as arrests instead of transfers “seems like a black and white policy violation.”

“I think it’s deceptive to the public. It’s deceptive to report four transfers when over 100 transfers took place, and these are community members who were removed from the community.”

Is the Fresno sheriff misreporting ICE data?

The Bee requested the arrest information nearly two years ago and only received documents in late June. Specifically, The Bee asked for the number of arrests inside the county’s jail vestibule, a secured room with an electronically locked door on each end. Only correctional officers are allowed to unlock the doors, and a sign outside the publicly-facing door says: “Entering secured area.”

All 102 cases were administrative arrests for civil federal immigration violations, according to ICE records obtained by The Bee.

A 2018 Fresno Bee story revealed the sheriff’s ICE access policy allowed federal immigration officers to enter the vestibule to make arrests.

Experts and attorneys who spoke to The Bee said any immigration arrests that happen at the jail — including inside the lobby — should be recorded as transfers.

Mims disagrees.

“The proper recourse is for experts and attorneys who do not agree is to contact Fresno County Counsel,” she said.

ICE officials said they agreed with Mims’ description and said making arrests inside sheriff’s facilities is necessary for public safety.

“The safest place to take (people) into custody is in the confines of the secure environment of another law enforcement agency,” Jonathan C. Moor, a spokesman for ICE, told The Bee in a statement.

Maria Romani, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said the ACLU raised the reporting issue with Fresno County officials in 2019.

“We made clear ... that sort of practice would constitute a transfer, and that if they were partaking in that sort of practice and they were not reporting it, that they would be in violation of their reporting requirements,” Romani told The Bee.

“I think none of us want to be lied (to) by our law enforcement,” Romani said. “For us, at the ACLU, we are continuing to monitor any sort of misreporting that could be happening.”

Chan said the sheriff’s office should be “accurately reporting how many people they’ve funneled into immigration detention.”

Fresno sheriff changed ICE cooperation policy

Mims said the Sheriff’s Office ICE policy was revised in 2018 and 2019 “in order to comply with the law” and for safety purposes.

“Due to concerns by outside groups (ACLU) that taking someone into custody inside the vestibule could be constituted as a “transfer,” we (FSO, County Counsel, and the ACLU) agreed to change the policy,” Mims wrote in her email to The Bee.

According to a copy of the current policy, the sheriff’s office now requires ICE and other law enforcement agencies to request permission in writing to enter the vestibule to make an arrest.

The supervising sergeant evaluates requests on a case-by-case basis. Approved requests must be documented as an “incident report,” according to the policy. The jail’s releasing officers can also request permission to allow ICE into the vestibule.

Tony Botti, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, said there is no specific amount of time required for ICE to submit its request to enter the vestibule.

ICE hasn’t requested to enter the vestibule for arrests since the Sheriff’s Office changed its policy, Mims said.

“ICE may still make arrests in the lobby of those they want to detain who don’t meet the transfer criteria, however, according to lobby staff, that is less frequent,” she said. “Additionally, we do not track ICE arrests in the lobby.”

Both civil rights attorneys said the sheriff’s policy updates haven’t fixed the problem.

“If it happens, even outside the jail, but it’s them taking a person in their custody and handing them directly to ICE, that person has no chance to be out before ICE picks them up,” she said. “Oftentimes, you are also holding people for extra time in order to make it that ICE appears exactly at the time when the person should be released.”

The Sheriff’s Office, so far this year, has recorded 33 transfers to ICE, according to Mims.

Transfer numbers have dipped during the pandemic and were higher at the beginning of 2020. Those transfers, Mims said, followed a different process than re-arrests in the vestibule or the lobby.

In 2019, the Sheriff’s Office recorded just one transfer to ICE, according to data from the state’s Department of Justice.

“Since the (policy) update, ICE has changed its process, and we are now seeing more actual transfers ... in regard to qualifying conditions,” Mims said.

Moor, the ICE spokesperson, said to ensure the “highest level of safety and security” in the country, “ICE encourages all law enforcement agencies to cooperate with ICE to the maximum extent possible.”

Moor said cooperation between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement is “indispensable” for the general public’s safety.

“Policymakers who strive to make it more difficult to remove dangerous criminal aliens and aim to stop the cooperation of local officials and business partners, harm the very communities whose welfare they have sworn to protect,” he said.

In 2019, he said, more than 86% of people arrested by ICE across the country on civil immigration charges also had criminal convictions or pending charges. He described many of those crimes as serious or violent.

“ICE lodges detainers on individuals who have been arrested on criminal charges and who ICE has probable cause to believe are removable aliens,” he said. “The detainer asks the other law enforcement agency to notify ICE in advance of release and to maintain custody of the alien for a brief period of time so that ICE can take custody of that person in a safe and secure setting upon release from that agency’s custody.”

The Supreme Court in June said it would not hear an appeal from the Trump administration challenging the state’s sanctuary law. An April 2019 decision by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s request to suspend the law, and that decision stands, according to Chan.

Romani said there is room to strengthen the law.

“I think that in order to have (uniform) implementation of the law, there is room to include some provision in the law that would incentivize law enforcement to follow the law to the tee.”

Yesenia Amaro

559-441-6144

Yesenia Amaro covers immigration and diverse communities for The Fresno Bee. She previously worked for the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia and the Las Vegas Review-Journal in Nevada. She recently received the 2018 Journalistic Integrity award from the CACJ. In 2015, she won the Outstanding Journalist of the Year Award from the Nevada Press Association, and also received the Community Service Award.