An ICE agent appears at Riverside courthouse, raising questions about enforcement vs. justice

An agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up at a Riverside County Superior Courthouse this month, a rare but legal move that prompted immigrant-rights advocates and some legal experts to suggest that courts should be treated as off-limits for immigration enforcement.

The agent, in plain clothes, went to the courthouse on Monday, Sept. 9, and asked about a non-citizen in the courtroom. The lawyer who represents the man contacted Andrea Garcia, an immigration specialist with the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office, who soon met with the agent.

“I asked him what he was doing there, or what he needed. And (I) also asked him for his card,” Garcia added. “He began to give me his business card, but stopped and walked away.”

Garcia declined to say what the non-citizen was doing in the courthouse, but said the ICE agent was looking for him because he had violated an immigration order.

Immigration agents usually avoid enforcement in so-called “sensitive” locations, such as schools and hospitals. Though many immigration advocates would like courthouses also to be off-limits, ICE officials do not consider courthouses to be sensitive locations.

“ICE’s enforcement activities at courthouses are consistent with longstanding law enforcement practices nationwide. And, courthouse arrest are often necessitated by the unwillingness of jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE in the transfer of custody of aliens from their prisons and jails,” a spokesman with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ICE, wrote in an email.

Still, such picks-ups are relatively unusual in Southern California courts, advocates said. And some immigrant supporters as well as people connected to the justice system, including California Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, argue that courthouses should be be made official no-go areas for ICE agents because the presence of immigration agents in courthouses erodes trust between immigrants and state and local law enforcement agencies and judges.

Immigration agents in courthouses have “a chilling effect on witnesses that need to attend court, defendants, and other interested parties,” Garcia said.

“And by ICE plucking a person from court, while they’re midstream in any case, (that person doesn’t) get to finish that process,” Garcia added. “I think people should be afforded due process of law.”

Jennaya Dunlap, deportation defense coordinator for the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, said her organization hasn’t heard of many instances of ICE agents in local courthouses. Last year, she heard of one case   involving two unauthorized immigrants who were picked up in Riverside during a court recess, she said.

“When (ICE agents) don’t have a way of finding a person’s home address, they may try to arrest a person at the courthouse, or try to follow them back to where they live,” Dunlap said.

“For us, even though it’s not considered a sensitive location, it should be,” she added. “It’s an obstruction of justice for us.”