Reading the Chron’s article yesterday about citizens suing the US for having been wrongly held/deported, reminded me of an email exchange I had with Mayor Newsom’s mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard earlier this year.
I’d asked Ballard what the city is doing to guarantee due process to juveniles who are arrested on suspicion of having committed a felony and who the city suspects are also undocumented.
It’s a question that immigrants rights’ advocates have been asking since Newsom changed the city’s sanctuary policy last summer. And the answers coming from the Mayor’s Office have been troubling to say the least
As these advocates note, using Juvenile Probation Department data to support their case, back in 2006 there were 288 petitions filed against Latin American juveniles, but only 211 were sustained. That means that if Newsom had revised the city’s policy in 2006, 77 Latin American juveniles who weren’t actually found to have committed a felony could have been reported to ICE and deported.
And as the Chronicle noted yesterday, though US citizens are a tiny fraction of the 400,000 people who pass through ICE custody each year, cases in which they are held and/or deported “occur with some regularity.”