Daily Archives: December 4, 2012

TRUST Act Reintroduced to Dem supermajority in Sacramento

And Assm. Tom Ammiano and several co-sponsors have reintroduced the Trust Act, banning local law enforcement from turning over illegal immigrants to the feds for possible deportation if their crime is relatively minor. “We must make sure that Se Communities focuses on violent and hardened criminals, not on day laborers, not domestic workers,” said State Senator Kevin DeLeon (D-Los Angeles). Republicans will have little say. “Our role will be, hopefully, partnering with the press. We will help shine a light on what’s going on in the government,” said California Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar). But Democrats believe voters gave them a mandate to get things done. Senator Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) says: “I think the biggest danger is that we would move too cautiously and not address the problems that California has been facing. California voters have demanded that we govern and that’s what we intend to do.”

California’s ‘anti-Arizona’ TRUST Act is back for another round | 89.3 KPCC

Two months after California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill known as the TRUST Act “as written,” a lawmaker is reintroducing it in the Assembly. Bill sponsor Tom Ammiano, a Democratic Assembly member from the Bay Area, announced Monday that he’s bringing back a reworked “3.0” version of the bill. It aims to limit state and local cops’ cooperation with federal immigration agents. While it differs from the earlier amended version Brown had vetoed, it’s closer in ways to the original bill the legislature voted on in 2011. The idea of the measure, dubbed earlier this year as the “anti-Arizona bill,” is to set limits on who California state and local authorities can hold for deportation at the behest of federal immigration authorites, restricting it to only those with serious criminal convictions on their records. The TRUST Act (an acronym for “Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools”) is intended to limit the state’s participation in Se Communities

Connecticut official faults US handling of immigrant

An adviser to Connecticut’s governor is criticizing the U.S. government’s detention of a Mexican immigrant under the federal Se Communities program. Mike Lawlor, the governor’s top aide on criminal justice policy, joined advocates at a rally Thursday condemning the initiative that took effect statewide earlier this year. The immigrant, 34-year-old Josemaria Islas of New Haven, was arrested in July on charges that he tried to steal a bicycle. His lawyers said he was wrongfully arrested and the charges were later reduced to misdemeanors, but instead of being released, he was turned over to federal agents at the request of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Lawlor said the case shows why the program that shares arrestee fingerprints with ICE could lead immigrant communities to lose trust in police officers.