This Bay Area County Says It Cut Ties with ICE. This Program Says Otherwise.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, local officials in the Bay Area have worked to layer on more protections for immigrant families. In Alameda County, a diverse community that’s home to the liberal bastions of Berkeley and Oakland, officials on the Board of Supervisors have dedicated millions to fund a rapid response hotline for reporting ICE activity and responding to arrests, as well as immigrant rights trainings and legal defense for people in deportation proceedings. Officials also convened a survey of the county’s data practices to highlight ways that ICE may access sensitive information on immigrants—like data on local ID programs for immigrants that may inadvertently help federal agents target people who are undocumented. And Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez announced this year her department has a “zero contact policy” with ICE. 

“We don’t communicate with ICE,” Sanchez said at a county board meeting in February. “We are not sharing information. We are not collecting information related to any type of documentation status.”

But the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office received over $1 million from the federal government last year in exchange for sharing sensitive information, including names, birthplace and country of origin, under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP). The program is managed in part by ICE, and uses federal dollars to reimburse local jails and prisons for the costs of detaining undocumented immigrants. 

The program supports local and state budgets nationwide—even in so-called sanctuary cities and states that forbid certain law enforcement cooperation and data sharing with ICE—by paying counties based on the number of undocumented people detained in local lockups for at least four consecutive days who are convicted of felonies or two misdemeanors. The data sent to ICE includes personal information like names, ID numbers, details on the facility holding them, information about their convictions, and where they were born.

A spokesperson for Sanchez’s office defended the county’s participation in the program in a written statement to Bolts and claimed that the office does not “provide documentation or immigration status in order to receive reimbursement, as suggested.” Rather, according to the office, it provides a list of information about the county’s incarcerated population, including “Place of Birth,” to a third-party contractor (called Justice Benefits, Inc, or JBI) that works with the county to identify which inmates qualify for the grant, which is only applied to undocumented immigrants. The office said this data does not amount to “information on immigration status.” 

“To reiterate: at no point does the Sheriff’s Office ask for or collect information on immigration status, nor is such information required for us to provide to JBI for the SCAAP grant,” the statement read.

But some jurisdictions have chosen to withdraw from SCAAP in recent years to keep from feeding more information into ICE’s deportation dragnet. Right across the Bay from Oakland, officials in San Francisco terminated their county’s participation in SCAAP ahead of the first Trump administration, though Alameda County did not follow suit. At least one sheriff, in Wisconsin’s Dane County, has also quit since Trump’s return to power.

Immigrant rights advocates who have pushed for their counties to end participation in the program say local police shouldn’t rely on funding from immigration enforcement. They argue that those financial ties could motivate local police to target those perceived as immigrants, investigate the documentation status of people detained at the jail, and can influence sheriffs to align behind Trump’s deportation agenda. While SCAAP doesn’t entail real-time data-sharing on immigrants serving out convictions in local jails, it does provide ICE with a detailed annual snapshot; advocates pushing to end local ties to the program point out that sentences served in local lockups rather than state prison are typically for minor or nonviolent offenses. 

During Trump’s first term, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors questioned the county’s participation in SCAAP as part of a broader review of local policies affecting immigrants. The county organized an Ad Hoc Committee for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to assess the government’s interactions with ICE as well as the resources available to communities impacted by deportations. The committee ultimately could not determine whether SCAAP violated the state’s sanctuary laws banning officers from investigating immigration status and sharing that data with ICE; according to the committee’s review, it is the private contractor that ultimately sends a “list of potentially eligible inmates” to the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance, which administers the grant program alongside ICE. Any sensitive data, the committee concluded, was only shared in an annual report to ICE long after any immigrants named as being in county custody had already been released.

The committee did ultimately suggest that the sheriff reconsider participating in the program as one of the recommendations issued in its final report in late 2021. Alameda County has remained in SCAAP, taking over $9.3 million since the start of Trump’s first term. 

Peter Mancina, a researcher and consultant on sanctuary policy who led Alameda County’s review of data-sharing practices with ICE during the first Trump administration, says officials should again question their participation in SCAAP as Trump dramatically escalates his targeting of immigrants during his second term. Mancina told Bolts that even though the data shared through SCAAP isn’t used by ICE to make arrests in real time, the federal dollars still give local sheriffs “a perverse incentive to police immigration.” 

“The critical issue is creating a funding stream that is specifically tied to immigration enforcement,” Mancina told Bolts. ​​”It is really about incentivizing police to cooperate with the federal government. It maintains this relationship of interdependence.”

While participation in SCAAP has waned over the years in the face of shrinking reimbursement rates and a growing aversion toward ICE, over 400 counties received money through the program last year. The program paid out nearly $145 million last year to counties and prison systems across the country, with the largest award of over $45 million going to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. 

The information that local and state law enforcement exchange for SCAAP funding feeds into a much larger web of ICE surveillance. Starting in 2008, the federal Secure Communities program rolled out across the country to provide certain information to ICE on anyone arrested and booked into a local lockup—like fingerprints, charges, and other personal information—so that the agency can file so-called detainers, or requests for local police to hold someone for immigration enforcement. 

Even if the immediate risks are less acute with a program like SCAAP, advocates who track local police cooperation with ICE have long worried that, by participating in the data-sharing program, local police are incentivized to collect and send ICE more information than they would otherwise share—namely, the immigration status of people in local jails, which can then be turned over to ICE in exchange for federal money. “It has always been a concern that the incentives behind SCAAP are bad. Even if it is pennies on the dollar, it creates an incentive to incarcerate people who are not citizens,” said Lena Graber, senior attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which is headquartered in the Bay Area. 

Some sanctuary policies have prompted local law enforcement to drop SCAAP, even if they don’t explicitly ban participation. For instance, all jails in Washington effectively stopped receiving SCAAP grants by 2020 after the state enacted the Keep Washington Working Act, which prohibited local police from collecting the information on immigration status that the program requires. The state later set aside funds to backfill the loss of revenue for counties that relied on SCAAP money. 

California’s TRUST Act, which lawmakers passed in 2013, prevents state and local police and lockups from detaining and turning people over to ICE over minor crimes, like most traffic offenses. The California Values Act passed in 2017 also limits officers from questioning immigrants about their status, but sheriffs are granted some leeway by carvouts that exclude many convictions from that protection. Despite the restrictions on information gathering and sharing, 35 counties in California still participate in SCAAP.

The California State Sheriffs’ Association initially lobbied against a statewide sanctuary law when it was first proposed more than a decade ago. Angela Chan, a longtime immigrant rights attorney who worked with the Free SF Coalition, which fought for years for statewide sanctuary protections, told Bolts she’d never come across SCAAP until several sheriffs who opposed the TRUST Act raised concerns that the law could cost them federal funding that they received through the program. San Francisco’s sheriff during that time, Michael Hennessey, supported the TRUST Act, but still had some hesitation about pulling out of the program. 

​​”We only really looked into SCAAP because sheriffs brought it up as an excuse to continue to work with ICE,” Chan told Bolts. “The sheriff in San Francisco was more aligned with us in terms of values. He was concerned with questions of racial profiling, and wanted to adhere to our sanctuary ordinance. The funding was a consideration for him, but it was a smaller point of pushback from him compared to more conservative sheriffs.”

The state sheriff’s association, helmed at the time by then Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern, ultimately dropped its opposition to the TRUST Act before its passage, but fought subsequent plans to strengthen protections like the state’s restrictions on private ICE detention facilities. 

In San Francisco, Chan and other organizers pushed for the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department to stop taking SCAAP grants. In 2016, the county ended its participation in the data-sharing program and hasn’t rejoined it since. 

Federal officials have previously tried to use SCAAP funds to pressure local governments to dismantle sanctuary protections, even before Trump. Under President Barack Obama, justice department officials in 2016 threatened to restrict SCAAP reimbursements to agencies that limited cooperation with ICE, and launched an investigation into some departments—though the department took no enforcement action against sanctuary jurisdictions before Obama left office.

After Trump took over in 2017, he doubled down in his first weeks in office with an executive order to pull federal funds from sanctuary cities in an attempt to force them to dismantle protections, zeroing in on money that went to law enforcement agencies: Justice Assistance Grants, which are the largest source of federal funding for local police, as well as SCAAP money, which by contrast typically makes up only a small fraction of local budgets. A federal judge ruled that year that the policy was illegally coercive and violated the sole authority of Congress to control federal funding. 

Trump’s reelection has ushered in a new wave of attacks on sanctuary policies, leading again to pressure from advocates for local police to cut ties with ICE data-sharing programs like SCAAP.

Tim Muth, a senior attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin, told Bolts that the organization started tracking widely-used federal grants like SCAAP as part of their 2022 report on the state’s jail-to-deportation pipeline. Muth says the organization launched a campaign that year to pull Dane County, home to Madison, out of the program after learning that the state’s other progressive stronghold, Milwaukee County, stopped relying on the funds nearly a decade ago.

“It was striking to us that, of the two major counties in Wisconsin that are both seen as progressive and to have good policies with respect to immigration enforcement, that Dane County was receiving this money, but Milwaukee wasn’t,” Muth told Bolts. 

The ACLU’s campaign succeeded in late January, when Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett agreed to stop sharing data on detained immigrants and end participation in SCAAP. 

Barrett attributed his decision to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “[W]hile the information compiled for these grant dollars was historical and posed little concern amongst our diverse community in the past, times have changed and we must adapt accordingly,” Barrett said in a statement after dropping the program. Barrett also said that “the process of compiling data for this grant required significant staff time,” and added, “Moving forward, those resources will be redirected toward more impactful initiatives in our jail, such as re-entry coordination and rehabilitation programming.”

Most counties don’t receive enough money from SCAAP to encourage officers to arrest immigrants, Muth said. But the program does give law enforcement an incentive to investigate the immigration status of people already in their custody. While that information might not help ICE make arrests, it still “​​feeds more information of the criminal history of undocumented individuals into the ICE data machine,” he said. 

“ICE has stated that they are only going after undocumented people who have committed crimes,” Muth said. “You can see how a database of people who have served convictions in county jails, fed by people asking for SCAAP money, becomes one of the sources of information for the deportation machine.”

In the Bay Area, Graber with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center says that activists in Alameda County might not have been as focused on SCAAP as San Francisco was during the first Trump administration because they were “putting out other fires.” 

Ahern, Alameda County’s sheriff during those years, drew backlash from grassroots groups for lobbying against sanctuary protections. After the state passed the TRUST Act, Ahern directed the department to sidestep those protections by notifying federal agents ahead of time when and where undocumented immigrants would be released from his custody so they could be immediately put into ICE custody without his deputies directly transferring them. After the state banned the sharing of release times in 2017, organizers accused Ahern of exploiting another loophole to continue assisting ICE. 

“The prior sheriff was definitely more friendly to ICE in a lot of ways,” Graber said of Ahern, who was ousted in 2022 by Sanchez, the current sheriff who ran on reforming the department. “He was handing people over to ICE.”

The county’s current efforts to reinforce protections amid Trump’s barrage of attacks on sanctuary cities is organized under a new body called the Alameda County Together for All Ad Hoc Committee. At a February meeting, the committee brought together data privacy experts to give presentations on potential exposures in local agency’s record keeping systems to ICE surveillance tactics. The committee’s chair, Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, agreed at the meeting to advance a survey of Alameda County’s data and retention practices, as well as a review of local privacy policies—similar to the review the county undertook during the first Trump years. 

In response to Bolts‘ questions about SCAAP, Fortunato Bas provided a statement saying, “I take the issues of data privacy and the safety of all our community members very seriously,” pointing to the new review and adding, “we are carefully evaluating what sensitive data is being collected.”

“The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office does not request or collect immigration status during any encounter with the public, including interactions with our incarcerated population,” Sanchez’s office said in response to Bolts’ questions about the program. “The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office remains in full compliance with the California Values Act.”

Local immigrant rights organizers say the sheriff has proactively worked with them to shape department policy. If the county again questions its participation in SCAAP, it may be in a stronger position to withdraw now that it has a sheriff who has espoused a “zero contact policy” with ICE, Chan said. 

Mancina, the researcher who looked into SCAAP as part of Alameda County’s previous review of policies that collaborate with ICE, says that the program functions as a tool for aligning local governments behind federal immigration priorities, which he says have grown increasingly extreme by “transforming every single person who has a civil immigration violation into a criminal.” As organizers focus on ending more urgent forms of local law enforcement cooperation with immigration enforcement that directly assists with ICE detention and deportations, Mancina says that SCAAP is a reminder of the financial ties that local police have to immigration enforcement—and, he says, underscores the difficulty of “fully disengaging local police from ICE.” 

“Sanctuary policies don’t end the relationship with the federal government. They just transform them,” Mancina said. With SCAAP, he added, “It is less about the number of people deported, and more about creating a culture of fear and horror.”

(*This story was updated to include a statement Fortunato Bas sent after publication)