To improve public health, the entanglement between local sheriffs and ICE agents must end

When driving down Highway 99, the lifeline of the San Joaquin Valley, it’s all too easy to overlook the jarring contradiction that immigrants in our region contend with daily.

Alongside the many buses transporting people to the region’s numerous prisons, jails and immigration detention facilities, one sees billboards encouraging people to get vaccinated, eat healthy, or enroll at a community clinic.

But studies show that, for immigrant families, the presence of policing, arrests and deportations in their communities does not go hand-in-hand with good physical or mental health. It is destructive to their well-being.

If state and local officials truly value protecting and improving the health of our immigrant communities, then they must work to cut the link between law enforcement and immigration enforcement — a shadow coalition that is actively traumatizing our communities and preventing California from realizing its commitment to public health.

Although California aims to be a sanctuary state for immigrants, in the San Joaquin Valley, the state’s pro-immigrant laws are not fully implemented. A report from the ACLU of Northern California shows that sheriffs in the Valley have worked to evade those laws through various forms of cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

For example, sheriffs’ deputies hold people in jail for extra time to allow ICE agents to detain them, or they “release” people into non-public areas of jails where ICE agents arrest them, allowing officers to avoid publicly reporting the transfers. If not for the fact that they are immigrants, these people would be going home to their families in the Valley. Instead, local law enforcement has secretly worked to rip them away, triggering a cycle of trauma in their lives and within their families.

A recent study by researchers at UC Merced and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research further shows that, in fact, the incarceration-to-deportation pipeline has touched the lives of many people in our region. We found that immigrants across California are surveilled, profiled and deported at the hands of both local law enforcement officers and federal immigration authorities. However, higher proportions of immigrants in the San Joaquin Valley reported direct experiences with federal immigration enforcement authorities and local law enforcement officers when compared to the Bay Area and the Los Angeles-Southern California.

Almost 1 in 2 residents in the San Joaquin Valley knew someone who had been deported. One in 5 had stayed home to avoid interacting with law enforcement and 1 in 6 had been racially profiled by officers.

The research further showed that for each additional encounter that immigrants have with local law enforcement or immigration enforcement authorities, they report a greater level of psychological distress and a lower level of general well-being.

Numerous other public health studies, conducted in communities like ours across the country, show what the immigrant communities of the Valley already know: our nation’s harsh immigration enforcement system is a source of chronic stress (a known cause of heart disease) and psychological distress, and causes people to avoid seeking medical care.

State lawmakers have an opportunity to make a new investment in the health of those communities by strengthening our state’s sanctuary laws. The VISION Act (AB 937) would clearly prohibit state and local law enforcement from colluding with ICE by prohibiting custody transfers. A bright-line rule would ensure proper and equal implementation across the state and ensure that all immigrants are protected. The bill would shield individuals from inhumane conditions in immigration detention, close the main pipeline filling immigration detention beds, and reunite refugee and immigrant families and communities.

State leaders have already recognized the importance of investing in the well-being of all Californians, including noncitizens. Passing the VISION Act is a critical opportunity to realize that commitment.

This story was originally published August 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "To improve public health, the entanglement between local sheriffs and ICE agents must end."