Case Explained: Investigation: ICE arrests at county jails far more frequent than official reports show – Legal Perspective

The white van was already parked outside the Santa Barbara County jail before Gustavo’s release in January. Two ICE agents, masked and armed, were ready in the lobby with handcuffs. 

A few days prior, Gustavo was arrested by local police after a fight with his wife, and a judge ordered him to wear an ankle monitor that would track his blood alcohol level. To await trial, he expected to return to his home in Santa Barbara and his work as a restaurant cook. He had lived in the area for seven years after crossing the border from Mexico. 

Gustavo has at least one minor driving offense on his record. But that low-level conviction meant local authorities, under state law, were barred from coordinating with federal agents to place him in immigration custody. 

Still, his moment of liberty between jail personnel and ICE handcuffs was mere seconds. 

“They led me out by the arms, and ICE was already there,” Gustavo, who asked not to use his last name for fear of repercussions for himself and his wife, said in an interview in Spanish. He said it felt to him that the deputies “delivered me to them.” 

The California Values Act, a state law often known as SB 54, was intended to prevent migrants from fearing police. It prohibits local law enforcement from transferring anyone into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents unless the person has already been convicted of a felony or certain serious misdemeanors. 

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office says that in 2025, it transferred 12 people to ICE under the tenets of SB 54. The Sheriff’s Office says a qualifying inmate is notified about the transfer, and when the time comes, is taken to a secure set of doors known as a “sally port,” where an ICE vehicle is waiting.  

But dozens more people have been arrested in the lobbies and parking lots of county jails in the past year, including many for whom ICE records do not disclose any conviction, much less a conviction that meets the SB 54 threshold, a Santa Barbara News-Press investigation has found. 

While the official number of transfers for the year was 12, federal data suggests in 2025, ICE arrested more than eight times that number at Santa Barbara County jails. 

The investigation found:

• Immigration agents arrest far more people at county jails than the number the Sheriff’s Office reports. ICE agents arrested at least 99 people at Santa Barbara County jails in 2025, according to academic research of federal detention records. Local ICE observers have documented such arrests happening not only in a sally port, but also on the street outside county jails and inside jail lobbies.

• Many of those arrested may have no history of criminal conviction. At least 13 people whose criminal history was too low to qualify for a transfer under SB 54 were arrested at local jails in the past year, according to attorneys and legal observers who maintain a list of arrests they have monitored. Federal detention records show the number is likely much higher, with at least 30 people listed as having no criminal conviction.

• While the Sheriff’s Office says it does not coordinate with ICE on jail lobby arrests, ICE has access to a variety of information that would make these arrests easier. The Sheriff’s Office posts release dates for all inmates on its website, and will give a two-hour window for the expected release time to anyone who calls and asks. According to law enforcement surveillance experts, ICE has access to a vast network of databases that could help the agency identify people in custody. The Sheriff’s Office sometimes receives advance notice from ICE agents that they intend to make an arrest, but the office does not notify inmates about ICE presence in most cases. 

• The Santa Barbara County sheriff opposed SB 54 before it was passed, and the state attorney general has raised questions about his compliance with the law’s reporting requirements. Sheriff Bill Brown traveled to Sacramento to lobby the state legislature on changes to SB 54, and said he opposed the bill’s final version. Last year, in response to an inquiry from the attorney general, Brown wrote that his office didn’t believe any of the arrests ICE was making at Santa Barbara County jails — regardless of people’s criminal histories — constituted “transfers” under the law, and therefore had not reported any of the ICE arrests. The office subsequently updated seven years worth of the annual data it had reported.

Cesar Vasquez, an organizer with the 805 Rapid Response Network, says he has been tracking ICE “all day, every day, for nine months.” The frequency of ICE arrests in jail lobbies and parking lots has left Vasquez and other local activists questioning how federal agents can so quickly target migrants when they’re released. The law prohibits most cooperation between Iocal law enforcement agencies and ICE. 

The Sheriff’s Office responded to emailed questions from the News-Press but did not make any member of its leadership available for an interview about the office’s SB 54 policies. 

In a county supervisors’ meeting last year, Undersheriff Bob Bonner said, “We are following California law as it stands.” The sheriff, in his response to the attorney general, wrote that his office was “fully committed to complying with SB 54.” 

While the Sheriff’s Office may not be intentionally steering inmates toward these outside ICE arrests, legal experts say ICE agents have access to a host of resources that helps them target anyone who passes through local jails. 

The state law — which promotes “a relationship of trust between California’s immigrant community and state and local agencies” — was intended to keep most people who interact with local law enforcement out of reach of immigration agents. But arrests in Santa Barbara County show how frequently the results turn out otherwise. 

ICE arrests at jails are numerous, hidden

SB 54, signed into law in late 2017, put significant limits on local and state law enforcement, forbidding them from using any resources to help federal agents detain or arrest migrants, except those with serious, recent criminal convictions.

Because many people booked into local jails face far less serious charges, the law’s goal was to reduce the number of migrants whom local police could funnel into deportation. Immediately, it had some success. 

According to internal ICE data, the number of people the agency detained at California jails dropped by almost half in the first few months after the law went into effect. The law requires each policing agency to report to the state the number of “transfers” they have made to immigration officials each year, and those numbers declined after 2018. 

But soon after the law took effect, something else became clear. 

While sheriffs’ offices officially transferred a certain number of people from jails to ICE, the total number of those arrested by immigration agents at local jails was sometimes much larger. 

Only the official transfers of people with serious criminal records, which involve transparent local law enforcement collaboration, are reported to the state and discussed in yearly public meetings between county supervisors and sheriffs, leaving the more numerous, unofficial ICE arrests at jails hidden from view. 

On the same day, ICE could arrest someone with a felony conviction through the sally port, and arrest another person, convicted of a low-level crime, just a few feet away, in the lobby of the jail. But only the felon’s arrest would be reported to the state as an ICE transfer.   

In 2024, according to state data, Santa Barbara County facilitated 16 transfers to ICE. But in reality, according to federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a Berkeley-based legal research group, ICE officers arrested at least 43 people at the Santa Barbara and North County jails.

In 2025, that divergence — between a small number of official transfers and a larger number of actual arrests at the jails — grew larger.

In January, emails show, the sheriff’s office believed that it had completed only six SB 54 transfers in all of 2025, based on the “receipt” forms it received from ICE, but a public defender alerted them to other inmates who had apparently also been transferred. A sheriff’s staffer, unable to find a record of whether those people had been transferred, emailed ICE to compare the receipts with the public defender’s list. 

“I know there were issues throughout the year where Custody staff were confused about letting your staff in so some individuals were apprehended in the parking lot when you should have been let in the sally port,” the staffer wrote. “I am just trying to verify to the best of my ability and appreciate any help I can get!”

An ICE agent replied with a list that included several arrests he said were made in the parking lot.

Ultimately, the Sheriff’s Office report to the state for 2025, obtained by the News-Press, shows the department reported 12 ICE transfers for the year, not six.

But federal data from the Deportation Data Project reveals ICE designated at least 99 of its arrests in 2025 as taking place at Santa Barbara County jails. 

Even that number is likely an undercount — the dataset includes many more arrests in the county that don’t specify a location, but which might also have been at or near a jail. 

For example, the News-Press investigation found one case in which a person released from the Santa Maria jail was immediately arrested by ICE. But the available ICE records show only one person arrested that day at any Santa Barbara County location who matched his nationality and birth year — and that arrest is coded as occurring in the Santa Maria “general area,” not at a jail.  

Local volunteers say they have noticed more jail arrests in the past six months, suggesting the trend will continue in 2026. “There’s been a lot more aggression,” Vasquez said, referring to an uptick in ICE sightings at local jails, beginning in August 2025. 

Data from the first two and a half months of 2026 shows continuing ICE activity at local jails, with 26 arrests listed in ICE records, nearly half of them people who did not have any criminal conviction. 

No clear history of conviction 

Under SB 54, local police or deputies may arrange to transfer people to an immigration agent only if they have been convicted of a felony in the past 15 years or convicted of certain serious misdemeanors in the past five years.

Because the law requires migrants to have been convicted of a crime, not just charged, this would exclude countless people who spend a night or two in jail — often after arrest or while awaiting trial. 

But data compiled by Berkeley researchers suggests this is not always how arrests play out in Santa Barbara. 

Twenty-seven people arrested by ICE at county jails in 2025 had no criminal convictions listed in ICE’s records, according to the data. At least one did not even have a criminal charge listed.  

A list compiled by local lawyers and advocates, obtained by the News-Press, includes 13 cases of people who did not have serious criminal records arrested in jail lobbies or parking lots in 2025. 

The official ICE transfers of people with severe convictions are happening often just feet away from the arrests of people without convictions. But the migrants transferred through official channels have the legal benefit of prior notification, while those without criminal histories or with lower level criminal records, like Gustavo, are taken by ICE agents without warning. 

The Sheriff’s Office, in response to questions from the News-Press, acknowledged that it receives advance notice “on occasion” that ICE agents plan to take action inside a jail lobby, but said such a heads-up “is not required and not done routinely.” The office said jail personnel do not notify inmates or their lawyers of ICE’s presence, even when officials have advance notice.

Migrant advocates say this sets inmates up for a surprise. 

Gustavo described the experience of being arrested in the jail lobby as a betrayal.  

“The judge told me I would go free,” he said. “I didn’t even make it out the door.”

Legal ‘loopholes’ allow ICE to learn about inmates 

According to Jeramie Scott, the director of surveillance oversight at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit oriented toward internet privacy, ICE would not need help from the sheriff to know who is in custody in local jails and whether they are undocumented. Even if local law enforcement is not giving information directly to ICE, in the course of routine activity like investigations and jail bookings, “they may be entering it into a system that percolates up to the database that federal law enforcement has access to,” Scott said.

ICE uses vast, “interoperable” databases of information gleaned from dozens of sources, from license plate readers to IRS records, to build profiles of people they suspect to be living in the country without paperwork. Local law enforcement also routinely interacts with federal agencies — for example, when a person is arrested, their fingerprints and other information may be sent to an FBI database. 

The result is that ICE may already know intimate details about the people they arrest. Gustavo, for example, had never interacted with federal agents, but he said the ICE agents already knew his full name and date of birth upon his arrest. 

If ICE agents seek a migrant in jail custody, that person isn’t hard to find. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office website lists the release date of all jail inmates publicly, and a phone call to the county jail narrows the release timeframe to a couple of hours. 

Vasquez, of the 805 Rapid Response Network, said release times are unpredictable, within the two-hour window provided by the jail, and volunteers often wait minutes or hours in the lobby. He said he noticed ICE agents sometimes waiting too. “It used to be that they would be out there maybe 30 minutes,” he said. But by August 2025, volunteers began to observe agents arriving at the jail with eerie precision — according to Vasquez, “within minutes of the release.” 

In response to questions from the News-Press, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office said it does not give extra release information to ICE and does not upload any information to shared databases that would allow ICE to estimate specific release times. 

“We don’t know which individuals may warrant ICE’s attention other than those that qualify under SB 54,” the office said. “The Sheriff’s Office is not always aware when individuals are apprehended by ICE following their release.” 

ICE data from the Berkeley researchers shows the agency does ask the Sheriff’s Office for information about other inmates. The News-Press analyzed unique identifier codes in the data and found ICE lodged an official request known as an I-247 with the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office about more than a third of the people whom they later arrested in jail lobbies and parking lots in 2025. Local officials are supposed to respond to these requests only if they pertain to inmates who qualify under SB 54. But the existence of the requests themselves would give the Sheriff’s Office a partial idea of which inmates could be at risk of a lobby arrest. 

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests from the News-Press to comment on how agents obtain information about migrants they arrest at the jails. 

Even if the Sheriff’s Office does not answer a request for information from ICE, the posting of jail release dates online has long been recognized as a loophole in the law, allowing for indirect collaboration between local law enforcement and ICE. 

Shortly after SB 54 took effect, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, one of the advocacy organizations involved in crafting the bill, wrote a report identifying what it saw as shortcomings in the protections the law offered. 

After the law was passed, some law enforcement agencies “met with or communicated with ICE officers to discuss how they could continue to work together despite SB 54’s restrictions,” the 2019 report said, noting that many agencies “decided to post release information and court hearing information, including dates, times, and locations online so that ICE could go ‘independently’ to those places to arrest the individuals.” 

California’s state government code requires some disclosure about people in custody, including requiring that a law enforcement agency “shall make public … the time and manner of release or the location where the individual is currently being held.”

But the report said police chiefs had identified the possibility of posting this information online as a “loophole” to ensure ICE could find release information. At the time, the report called out 24 California sheriff’s departments — nearly half of those in the state — for such postings, including in Santa Barbara. 

In response to questions from the News-Press, a sheriff’s representative said she could not confirm when the office began posting release dates online. Web archives of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office website in December 2017 — after SB 54 was passed — show a notice saying “Release Dates will be available in January of 2018,” the same time the law went into effect. Today, inmate release dates remain available to look up online. 

Data for ICE arrests in 2026, recently published by the Berkeley researchers, shows agents now include a data point on whether each arrest was “targeted” or “collateral.” The data lists all but one Santa Barbara jail arrest as “targeted” rather than “collateral.”

Vasquez says ICE agents in jail lobbies always appear to have a specific target, but often ask anyone in the vicinity who appears to be Latino whether they have legal residency in the United States. When the intended inmate appears, Vasquez says there’s no potential for escape from ICE, or to have a moment to say goodbye to a loved one who might be waiting. 

Agents “literally wait right outside the door. There’s no resisting that’s physically possible,” Vasquez said.

Sheriff has opposed SB 54 

Felicia Gomez, campaign director for the California Immigrant Policy Center, has studied the implementation of the California Values Act since it went into effect in 2018. She says legal loopholes, many of which were added to the legislation after pressure from law enforcement organizations, led to continued arrests outside county jails across the state. 

Brown, the Santa Barbara sheriff, was president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association at the time the California Values Act was written, and he lobbied against it. In a statement after the bill was passed, Brown said amendments to it had addressed “about 80 percent of the concerns we had … which is there would have been far too many people, serious and violent criminals, who would have been provided protection and sanctuary.” But even after those changes to allow for more collaboration with ICE, he said his group still opposed the bill.  

“After SB 54 was passed, a lot of departments were publishing a bunch of information about everyone who was in custody. I don’t think they ever framed it as a loophole, even though it is. There was a marked shift,” Gomez said. 

Advocates like Gomez say the existing loopholes hobble the intended protections for immigrants under the California Values Act. And if a law enforcement agency appears not to have complied with the law’s requirements, a primary recourse is to complain to the attorney general. 

Attorney General Robert Bonta sent a letter to Brown in August 2025, saying his office had received complaints that the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office was not recording ICE jail transfers correctly. The sheriff responded saying that while he was committed to complying with the law, the state had not made it clear what constituted a “transfer” from the jail to ICE. 

Brown said his office believed that it was completing inmates’ releases as required by law, and that the handover to immigration agents constituted “re-arrests by ICE, as they occur post release.”  

After this exchange, the Sheriff’s Office agreed to update its statistics. In its reports about the annual statewide numbers of SB 54 transfers, the state Criminal Justice Statistics Center now includes a disclaimer noting that “the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department submitted corrected reports of counts of transfers made from 2018-2024.”

While the Sheriff’s Office says it cooperates with ICE in circumstances where state law allows it, one email exchange reviewed by the News-Press shows ICE agents asking why the office wasn’t providing more assistance.

In January, after attempting to help a sheriff’s staffer clarify the number of SB 54 transfers the Sheriff’s Office made in 2025, the ICE agent replies again, saying he has noticed their recent requests to detain inmates at the Santa Maria jail were not being honored, ostensibly forcing the agents to conduct arrests in public areas of the jails, like lobbies and parking lots. He says agents would “just rather be in the safety of the secure compound but do understand the state and SB 54.” 

The sheriff’s staffer replies by explaining that she runs “a criminal history check on each individual and that tells us if we can notify your agency, so it could have been that recently, most of those we have received haven’t qualified for notification.” She also says the Sheriff’s Office was working on a more comprehensive list of which charges qualify under SB 54, which might ultimately allow them to coordinate with ICE more often.  

Moves to limit jail arrests

Gomez, of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said her organization is drafting new legislation intended to stitch up the law’s broader loopholes, to protect not just immigrants but the public at large. “There’s so much lack of transparency,” she said. 

“What information about all people is being shared in those databases by local law enforcement and filtered to federal agencies?” she asked.

But such jail arrests are not an inevitability. Other counties have stopped them almost completely. 

In Los Angeles County, county supervisors in 2020 passed a policy to prohibit all transfers from the sheriff’s custody to ICE without a judicial warrant. The number of ICE arrests at L.A. County jails fell to zero in the official numbers the county reported to the state. 

And unlike in Santa Barbara County, there appears to be no wild divergence between the official number of transfers and the actual number of arrests. Data from the Berkeley researchers for 2025 shows only a single ICE arrest at any Los Angeles County jail.  

Gomez says ICE offices in Southern California, flush with extra funding from the Trump administration, have begun filing judicial warrants to secure transfers from jails, but said she hopes for further legislation to limit those transfers as well. 

“Jail transfers are the backbone of how the deportation machine has operated across the country,” Gomez said. “We have to believe in second chances for people and their ability to thrive.”

Families separated by jail arrests struggle to survive

When a judge ordered him to be released awaiting trial, Gustavo thought he would go home. An order in his case from Judge Thomas R. Adams directed the Sheriff’s Office, prior to his release, to install an ankle monitor that would detect alcohol in his system. The order specifies “SCRAM,” meaning a device managed by SCRAM of California, a government contractor that provides various monitoring systems including a transdermal alcohol-sensing ankle bracelet.

Instead, Gustavo said, he was released without the anklet, and with ICE agents waiting outside.

In response to questions from the News-Press about how such monitors are typically handled, Commander Cassandra Marking of the Sheriff’s Office said that “SCRAM is responsible for making sure the device is installed in compliance with the court,” an inmate is “not released without the monitor” and “monitor placement is observed and confirmed by SBSO personnel.” 

Marking did not respond to follow-up questions about what would happen if SCRAM employees or sheriff’s staffers were aware ICE agents planned an imminent arrest of someone who was supposed to receive a monitor. 

SCRAM of California did not respond to repeated electronic messages or phone calls to its Santa Barbara office or its headquarters. 

Gustavo asked the ICE agents to show him a warrant, but they pushed him into a van without responding, injuring his left hand, he said in a phone interview with the News-Press. “They held my hands together, they handcuffed me, and they threw me inside,” he said. 

Though he remembered the mantra repeated by local activists in Santa Barbara, “no firmes nada” — don’t sign anything — he says five ICE agents at the field office in Camarillo held down his hand and forced him to sign a document authorizing his own deportation. 

Within 24 hours, he was dropped in Tijuana, leaving his wife behind. 

The immigration detention system has faced a variety of allegations of coercion for years, including of families separated from their children during the first Trump administration. 

A Times of San Diego report about detention in Southern California late last year found cases of migrants who said they were pressured to sign papers agreeing to deportation — at least one  through physical force. The Homeland Security Department did not respond to requests for comment on those claims or on Gustavo’s allegation. 

The court documents for Gustavo’s domestic violence case accuse him of both inflicting corporal injury and of assault “likely to produce great bodily injury.” 

Gustavo, in a phone interview, acknowledged he and his wife “had problems.” His wife did not agree to be interviewed. He pleaded not guilty. 

By March, Gustavo’s court date arrived, before Judge Teresa Martinez. He was not there — he had been deported. The court issued a warrant for failure to comply with a court order. 

Now that he has been deported, Gustavo is barred from applying for a U.S. visa for 10 years. If he is caught attempting to cross the border, the penalty is months or years in prison, and then another subsequent deportation. 

On her own, he said, his wife must figure out how to pay the rent and car bills. 

Jail arrests can leave entire families in freefall.

In September, a man from Santa Maria was pulled over by California Highway Patrol and taken to the North County jail. Court records show prosecutors later charged him with a low-level DUI, his second such offense. Neither charge was serious enough to trigger an ICE transfer under SB 54. But on the morning after his arrest, two ICE agents were waiting for him outside the jail, his wife said. He has been behind bars at the Adelanto immigration detention facility near Los Angeles for months, leaving his wife and four children rationing rice and beans. 

His wife, who asked not to use her name out of fear of further repercussions from immigration enforcement, says she makes $16 an hour working in the strawberry fields. Volunteers from 805UndocuFund and local food banks give the family bags of toilet paper and canned foods, and her sister moved in to help with the cost of living. Still, next month’s rent looms. 

During an interview in the family’s small, carpeted living room, her youngest son, age 9, sat on the floor playing video games. “He doesn’t understand where his dad is or what ICE is,” she said in Spanish, wiping away tears. “Sometimes I stay silent because I don’t know the answers to my kids’ questions.”

Her husband has chosen to appeal his order of deportation, a decision that means at least several more months in the detention center, where he is packed in with 50 other men in a cellblock. The couple’s nightly phone calls cost $50 a month on average. Still, the appeal is his only chance to come back to Santa Maria, where he has picked strawberries for over 20 years and built a foundation stable enough for his oldest daughter to enroll in college. 

If he is deported, the family will consider moving to Mexico, a decision his wife is not ready to confront. “I have a whole life here. It’s a life that’s all work, but it’s my whole life,” she said. 

But remaining in the U.S. would be a future with its own inevitable sacrifices, because she is also undocumented. It means living like prey, burrowing at home with the door locked and shutters drawn and sneaking out into the light only when necessary. “When I have to leave for work in the morning, I beg and pray to God to help me on my path so ICE doesn’t get me,” she said. 

She did not know a law was meant to prevent transfers of people like her husband from local jails to ICE custody. She expects, in the current climate, that any interaction with any authority is a path that leads to a detention center. 

“I don’t know why they do this, separate families,” she said. “When is this going to end?”

Joshua Molina of the News-Press contributed to this report.