Quick Take
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Chris Clark told Lookout that his department was not aware that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were planning to be at Santa Cruz Main Jail on Saturday.
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The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office was not aware that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were planning to conduct enforcement activity at the Santa Cruz Main Jail over the weekend.
Sheriff Chris Clark confirmed to Lookout that his office received no prior warning from federal immigration officials that they would be conducting enforcement in the county on Saturday.
Federal immigration agents arrived at the jail Saturday morning in an attempt to take an individual into custody, but left without detaining anyone. Agents remained outside the jail into the afternoon and had left by 2:30 p.m. It remained unclear where the agents went or whether they would return.
Volunteers with the ICE watchdog group Your Allied Rapid Response were patrolling the area throughout Saturday evening and into early Sunday morning, according to a volunteer.
Clark told Lookout in an interview on Monday that, in prior incidents involving ICE, the federal agency had provided his department with a courtesy notification. These notifications alert local law enforcement when federal immigration officials plan to conduct enforcement activity in their communities.
Lookout has previously reported the number of visits by immigration officials to Santa Cruz County based on these notifications, and have tallied at least 39 ICE courtesy calls across the county in the past two years.
The incidents Clark’s department is notified about typically involve targeted enforcement. Local law enforcement is not informed by ICE whether an arrest has been made.
“However, Saturday’s incident was interesting in the sense that I didn’t get any forewarning,” Clark said. “We didn’t get a call.”
Clark said the ICE presence came as a bit of a surprise early Saturday morning, but added that he was aware that immigration agents had been showing up at other county jails.
ICE agents later informed the sheriff’s office that they were at the jail to pick up somebody who had been arrested the night before, Clark said. The person immigration agents were looking for had been arrested for a DUI shortly after midnight early Saturday morning.
It was the fourth time the individual had been arrested on suspicion of DUI, Clark said. A fourth DUI is classified as a felony.
“I think they were assuming he would be released that morning, and he wasn’t,” Clark said. “Because of the nature of the charge, he’s not going to get out until he’s able to bail out, essentially.”
Clark said the agents had entered the public lobby of the Santa Cruz Main Jail but never went into any of the secured areas of the facility.
Clark said his department does not share the immigration status of individuals in the county jail with immigration officials because such cooperation is restricted under state Senate Bill 54. He said federal agents likely learned that the individual was in custody through fingerprint records.
Clark added that fingerprints taken when someone is arrested are processed and later shared with a centralized FBI database containing criminal history information from across the country. He said he assumed ICE agents learned of the arrest through the database.
“They were alerted via likely mining in their own systems that this person had been arrested,” Clark said.
Clark also clarified that the county’s ordinance prohibiting ICE agents from using county-owned parking lots, buildings and open spaces as processing locations, operational bases or staging areas to organize or deploy personnel does not prohibit immigration agents from being on jail property.
The county’s ordinance states: “The above prohibitions shall not apply to any actions taken by a Santa Cruz County law enforcement official acting within their scope of their official duties or to property subject to their exclusive control.”
However, if federal immigration agents showed up with a judicial warrant, Clark said that his department would have to comply with it.
“I want to reiterate that we don’t work with ICE. We don’t participate in immigration enforcement,” Clark said.
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