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AB 937
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<br />deportation. In response to this, on February 26, 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union
<br />(ACLU) filed Ms. L. v. ICE (S.D. Cal.), No. 3:18-cv-00428, a nationwide class action that sought
<br />to halt and undo the Trump administration’s family separation policy. On June 26, 2018, the
<br />district court issued a preliminary injunction ordering the U.S. government to halt the family
<br />separation policy, and to reunify all families that had already been separated . The court also
<br />stayed the deportation of separated families. The case is currently ongoing.
<br />However, it should be noted that another particularly cruel form of family separation also
<br />occurred under the Trump administration due to ICE. Many undocumented individuals live with
<br />family members in communities throughout the United States. As a result of increased
<br />enforcement and raids by ICE officials, such individuals have been apprehended and detained in
<br />detention centers, severing their connections to their loved ones, despite having no criminal
<br />record. (See Priscilla Alvarez, Family separation and the Trump administration’s immigration
<br />legacy (Oct. 7, 2020), CNN, available at https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/07/politics/trump-
<br />family-separation/index.html.) Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse
<br />University-based research organization, created a profile of detainees held in 217 ICE
<br />detention centers. As of June 30, 2018, ICE was holding 44,435 people in custody. Out of
<br />this group, 58 percent had no criminal convictions, while about 21 percent had committed a
<br />minor infraction, such a traffic violation; and 16 percent had committed what ICE
<br />considered a serious crime, which included offenses such as selling marijuana. (See
<br />Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Profiling Who ICE Detains - Few Committed
<br />Any Crime (Oct. 9, 2018), available at http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/530/.)
<br />The impact of these policies, particularly of family separation at the border, is ongoing. As of
<br />October 2020, hundreds of separated families had still not yet been reunited. Despite court orders
<br />to reunify these families (See Ms. L v. ICE, supra), poor record-keeping, increased criminal
<br />prosecutions of adult family members, and deportations of parents without their children have
<br />hindered reunification efforts. (See Kaitlyn Dickinson, Parents of 545 children separated at the
<br />border cannot be found (Oct. 21, 2020), New York Times, available at
<br />https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/migrant-children-separated.html.) For a far more
<br />thorough review of IC E’s history of abusing detainees, using deceptive tactics to carry out its
<br />raids, mismanaging its budget, misleading Congress , and struggling to carry out its core mission
<br />to protect the safety of the nation, please see the Committee’s analysis of AJR 1 (Kalra), which
<br />proposes to abolish ICE after transferring its duties to other federal officers and agencies in an
<br />orderly fashion.
<br />Now that Donald Trump is no longer president , why is the bill necessary? In 2017, motivated
<br />by the Trump administration’s cruel and extreme immigration policies, California passed a
<br />number of measures to protect residents of the state, including undocumented immigrants.
<br />Among these were three “sanctuary bills”: AB 450 (Chiu, Chap. 492, Stats. 2017, dealing with
<br />immigration inspection of workplaces), AB 103 (Committee on Public Safety, Chap. 17, Stats.
<br />2017, imposing inspection requirements on facilities that house civil immigration detainees), and
<br />SB 54, also known as the “Values Act” (DeLeon, Chap. 495, Stats. 2017, limiting the
<br />cooperation between state and local law enforcement with federal immigration authorities). In
<br />response to a Trump administration challenge to the laws, the 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals
<br />upheld most parts of all three of them. (U.S. v. California (9th Cir. 2019) 921 F.3d 865, cert.
<br />denied, U .S. v. California (2020) 141 S. Ct. 124.) And while Donald Trump’s p residency may
<br />have inspired the Values Act, it is also true that the suffering and abuse of immigrant
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