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Local Sheriffs Are Turning Their Jails Into ICE Detention Centers

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Local Sheriffs Are Turning Their Jails Into ICE Detention Centers

Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones spoke to inmates inside the jail in Hamilton, Ohio. Half of the jail’s beds have been contracted to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Vans carrying immigrants arrive at Ohio’s Butler County Jail, about an hour north of Cincinnati, throughout the day and night. They come from across the state, from Illinois, Michigan and even Arizona. Some detainees will spend a few nights here, others weeks, as they wait to be deported.

Immigrant detainees are not new to Butler County. Except for a hiatus during the Biden years, the sheriff has held a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use space in his jail for nearly two decades. But now they fill nearly half the jail’s 860 beds.

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Butler is among the largest of a growing number of county jails and other local facilities that now house a sizable chunk of ICE detainees, many of whom have never been charged with a crime. The agency’s use of these facilities has more than doubled since President Trump took office, and jails held about 10 percent of all detainees, or 7,100 people, on average, each day in July.

With detention numbers at a record high, jails have proven to be a quick and convenient way for ICE to expand its detention capacity beyond existing federal and private facilities. Many sheriffs are eager to assist in Mr. Trump’s mass deportation plans — and to shore up their budgets — by offering up their beds.

“We’re essential,” said Jonathan Thompson, the executive director and chief executive of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “ICE can’t do what they need to do under the current circumstances without sheriffs and our jails.”

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County jails play a critical role in ICE detention

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Sources: Deportation Data Project; ICE Detention Management

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Note: Only facilities with an average daily detainee population of at least one in July are shown. Not shown are facilities at the Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay; in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands; and at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

Jails are often the first stop on the way to somewhere else in ICE’s vast detention network, and they fill a geographic hole for ICE in the Midwest in particular, where there are few detention centers.

At most jails, ICE can easily spin up a contract through existing partnerships to hold federal inmates with the U.S. Marshals Service, reducing the time it takes to approve a new facility. County jails do not have to provide immigrants the same level of legal and medical services as those offered in dedicated ICE facilities, and the bed space is usually less expensive, too.

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Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

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This year, the agency has inked new detention contracts with jails in both rural counties and urban areas. Most of the sheriffs signing up are in red states or from Republican-led areas of blue states, like Nassau County in New York. But the agency also holds large contracts for detention space at jails in Democratic-led states, including Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont.

Norman Chaffins, the sheriff in Grayson County, Ky., visited the White House during the first Trump administration to hear from leaders at ICE and Border Patrol. “That’s where I first understood that even though we’re not a border state, we’re still feeling the effects of illegal immigrants right here in our county,” he said. The jail now holds about 150 people each day for ICE.

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Legal groups and immigrant advocates say local jails are ill-equipped to house immigrants, whose needs for legal, language and medical services are often different from those of other inmates. Inspections at some local facilities have turned up violations of ICE standards — water leaking from ceilings into beds, no daily change of clean socks and underwear — though conditions at county jails can vary widely.

During the Biden administration, ICE went as far as ending one jail contract in Alabama and pausing another in Florida, citing “serious deficiencies” and concerns about medical care. Under Mr. Trump, both facilities are once again holding hundreds of immigrants.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said that both facilities were recently inspected.

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“If county jails are good enough to hold U.S. citizens, then they are sure good enough to hold illegal aliens,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

Reviving an old model

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Jails have been part of the ICE detention system since the agency’s creation. During the George W. Bush administration, ICE had contracts with around 350 jails, and about half of all immigrant detainees were held in local facilities. The detention model, at the time, was to seek out contracts with lots of jails for little bits of use — five, 10, 20 beds.

At the start of the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security overhauled its approach to detention and began to contract with dedicated facilities designed specifically for ICE, mostly by private prison operators.

“At the county jails, oversight was complicated, and there were concerns about mixing civil immigration detainees with criminal inmates, and bad things were happening,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations. “The thinking was: Let’s reduce the number of county jails and focus on building civil detention.”

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Two parking spots are designated for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers at the Butler County Jail.

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Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Under Mr. Trump, ICE is seeking both new and old ways to find space for the tens of thousands of people in its custody. The administration has reopened several private facilities that sat dormant, and it has struck deals in Indiana and Nebraska to use beds in their state prisons. And it has turned back to the county jails.

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“All you sheriffs in the room, we need your bed space,” Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, said at a National Sheriffs’ Association’s conference in February.

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County jails have made room for ICE detainees

Average daily population at local facilities with the largest growth in ICE detention this year

A single county jail provides ICE with at most 500 beds a day, though many operate above their contracted capacity. In July, there were about 163 local facilities being used by ICE, and, on average, they each held about 44 people a day.

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“ICE doesn’t have the capacity for what they’re doing,” said Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Pinellas County, Fla. He said that ICE needs more beds for longer stays — 60 to 90 days — which some jails can provide. “You can deputize tons of local cops, but if the system doesn’t have enough room, what are you doing?”

In many cases, the size of the jail is less important to ICE’s strategy than its location. People arrested in nearly any state can be held locally until ICE can find space in one of its large, private detention facilities clustered in the South. Since the start of Mr. Trump’s crackdown, more than a third of all people arrested by ICE have been held in a local facility at some point.

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Thousands of ICE detainees have been moved through county jails

“We have the largest jail infrastructure in the world, and it’s an easy thing for ICE to fall back on,” said Silky Shah, the executive director of the Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that opposes immigrant detention. “The jail is a really central component of the deportation machine.”

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Political and other benefits

Many sheriffs see the decision to partner with ICE as good policy — most support tougher immigration restrictions, according to a 2022 survey — and good politics. Often, their constituents do too.

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“There’s an ideological role that’s played where sheriffs are excited about participating in the deportation process and supporting President Trump’s agenda,” said Mirya Holman, a professor of public policy at the University of Houston who studies the role of the sheriff’s office.

Inside Butler County Jail, Sheriff Richard K. Jones’s office displays several photographs of Mr. Trump, including one of both men thumbs-upping together after a campaign rally in Cincinnati in 2016 where the sheriff took the stage.

Mr. Jones first signed on to accept ICE detainees in 2008 but canceled the jail’s contract under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in part because he didn’t like the administration’s immigration policies. (The jail was also facing a lawsuit brought by two immigrants who alleged they were beaten by guards.)

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Richard K. Jones, the Butler County sheriff, displays an altered photograph of President Trump made to be shown brandishing a handgun, in his office.

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Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Mr. Jones said he got interested in helping ICE 20 years ago after an undocumented immigrant released from his jail went on to rape a 9-year-old girl. He feels his motivations line up with the administration’s enforcement priorities, even as they have expanded to include people without a criminal record.

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His corrections staff members, he said, prefer to work in the cellblocks housing immigrants.

“They don’t cause any trouble. They stay to themselves. They have tables they can play cards on,” he said. “My local homegrown prisoners want to fight all the time.”

ICE typically pays jails $70 to $110 per day per detainee, usually more than counties budget for local inmates. For some counties, that is a small but significant — and reliable — source of revenue. In Butler County, the total budget for the sheriff’s office this year is $49 million, and the county expects to earn about $4 million from ICE.

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But at least some sheriffs say it’s not worth it.

“We were making $1 million a year holding federal inmates,” Joe Kennedy, the sheriff in Dubuque County, Iowa, said about an earlier contract with the federal government. He declined an invitation from ICE to offer detention space in his jail this year.

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“The problem was, logistically, it was very difficult. You’re responsible for moving the inmates, getting them to court hearings — we were running people all over,” he said. “We’re not interested in putting our staff through that again.”

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At Butler County Jail, male ICE detainees are housed in a separate cellblock from local inmates.

Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

‘Carceral, punitive places’

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One of the chief criticisms of ICE’s jail partnerships is that jails are meant for criminal, not civil, detention. Most immigration violations are a civil offense, and about a third of people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal history.

“People hate private detention because they hate the profit motive, but the local jails are jail — they are carceral, punitive places,” said Royce Murray, who was a senior D.H.S. official in the Biden administration.

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In interviews, immigrants who spent time detained at county jails in Florida, Indiana and Kentucky described what they said was cruel and unfair treatment by corrections staff, including taking away their mattresses and bedding, or refusing to provide basic necessities like cups and spoons. One detainee said he would rinse out old potato chip bags in order to have something to drink water from.

Unlike local inmates arrested on charges like drunk driving or drug possession, immigrant detainees are rarely given the option to bond out of jail. While most are transferred to bigger ICE facilities after 72 hours, in some cases, they have spent weeks or months inside jails not designed for long-term stays.

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Average length of stay for ICE detainees held at county jails this year

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Source: Deportation Data Project

Note: Average length of stay reflects those booked into detention at local facilities after Jan. 20, or those who had been released as of July 28.

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There was once an effort to make the rules governing ICE facilities consistent — provisions like no less than five hours per week of access to law libraries for detainees, and at least one hour per day of outdoor physical exercise — but the agency has loosened those requirements for some facilities over the years, including many jails.

This year, there have been reports of overcrowded, unsanitary and inhumane conditions at some of the local facilities ICE uses. Detainees at a state corrections facility in Anchorage said they had been pepper sprayed and denied access to their lawyers. At the Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Mo., — which signed its first ICE detention contract this year — a 27-year-old Colombian man died by suicide in April. (As of this month, the jail will no longer accept new ICE detainees and will transfer existing ones, citing cost concerns.)

Federal officials declined to answer specific questions about these cases and said all jails used by ICE meet federal detention standards. “Routine inspections are one component of ICE’s multilayered inspections and oversight process that ensures transparency in how facilities meet the threshold of care outlined in contracts with facilities, as well as ICE’s national detention standards,” Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, said.

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Detainees at the Butler County Jail can access an indoor recreation room inside each cellblock.

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Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

On a visit in July, the Butler County Jail appeared clean and organized. It was not crowded. The jail holds about 90 people per cellblock, or “pod,” with two people per cell. Male ICE detainees were held in a separate area of the jail from regular inmates, but the few women were mixed with the local population. Small televisions showing Bounce TV played in the cells.

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But there was no library, no internet access or computers. In the pod reporters visited in July, there was one cart of about two dozen books. The pods at the jail each have their own recreation area: a concrete basketball half-court with a single window. Detainees are not allowed outside.

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Obama Center visitors say project symbolic of ‘Black excellence,’ claim scandal-free legacy while Trump ripped

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Obama Center visitors say project symbolic of ‘Black excellence,’ claim scandal-free legacy while Trump ripped

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CHICAGO — Opening weekend visitors at the Barack Obama Presidential Center called the 44th president’s legacy an example of unifying, scandal-free “Black excellence,” while they lamented what they view as a dark turn for the U.S. under President Donald Trump.

“The community is great, we’re just kind of glad it’s here,” Lauren Tillman, who lives about 40 minutes outside of Chicago, told Fox News Digital. “We needed something like this. Chicago looks like a certain place to certain people who are not from the area… so I just think this brought everybody together, like, ‘oh there’s something for the community,’ for Black people, and on Juneteenth, so I thought that was great, too.”

The presidential center’s opening weekend began with a star-studded private ceremony and concert on Thursday night, and the 19.3-acre campus opened to the public on Friday during the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the day Black slaves were declared free in 1865.

TOM HANKS, OPRAH, STEVEN SPIELBERG TURN OBAMA’S PRESIDENTIAL CENTER OPENING INTO HOLLYWOOD’S HOTTEST TICKET

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The Obama Presidential Center building is shown with its glass facade and surrounding trees. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)

“Just knowing that Chicago doesn’t always get the best rep, to know that we’ve had a Black president come from this place, and then to memorialize his legacy is just great,” said Ashley Woods, who joined Tillman at the opening.

“To know that [Obama] was going to try to do at least something for his people, that meant a lot to me and being here means a lot,” added Tillman.

“And I think, to piggyback off that, I think the legacy is Black excellence,” continued Woods. “Again, growing up in a place like Chicago, you don’t really think you can do much besides being a rapper or, you know, going into sports, but so see that somebody actually made it to the top per se, they were able to run the nation, there was very little scandal around him and his family, like it just shows you that we can be more than what America tells us we can be.”

OBAMA’S LEGACY PROJECT OFFERS LITTLE HOPE FOR CHICAGO’S SOUTH SIDE RESIDENTS

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Lauren Tillman and Ashley Woods speak with Fox News Digital at the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on Friday. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)

Sheryl Rogers and Peggy Neely-Harris made the trip from St. Louis for the weekend’s festivities.

“What it means for African Americans [is] a coming together, a reckoning, a remembrance of the excellence that is within each one of us, particularly in African Americans and particularly at this time when our very existence is under attack,” Rogers told Fox News Digital.

Neely-Harris agreed, and said that the brand new presidential center is a symbol of hope and renewal, and that the center is a “light in this present darkness.”

OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER SLAMMED FOR PROMOTING ‘FAR-LEFT’ AGENDA ON PUBLIC LAND

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Sheryl Rogers and Peggy Neely Harris speak with Fox News Digital on the opening weekend of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Friday. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)

“[Obama] has left an excellent example of how you should live, what type of character you should have and the love of family and community,” Rogers continued. “You can see love just exudes from them, and I love to see love in action.”

“No scandal,” she added.

However, Obama did face some major scandals and controversies during his two terms in the White House.

Obama’s DOJ infamously seized records of Fox News’ phone lines, including a phone number that belonged to the parents of a reporter.

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The seizure was approved after a warrant was granted by a judge, and in an affidavit seeking the warrant, an FBI agent called reporter James Rosen a likely criminal “co-conspirator” in a violation of the Espionage Act.

Obama also faced government weaponization claims when his IRS allegedly slow-rolled the tax-exempt nonprofit approval of grassroots conservative organizations that set out to oppose his agenda.

Groups with words such as “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names were allegedly hindered from forming for months and years.

OBAMA CENTER SUBCONTRACTOR FILES $40M DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT AGAINST ENGINEERING FIRM FOR OVERRUNS

Barack Obama speaks during the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, Thursday, in Chicago. (Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)

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Operation Fast and Furious was another chart-topping Obama scandal.

ATF agents intentionally allowed illegal straw purchases of weapons near the U.S. southern border with Mexico, in hopes that tracking the firearms would lead them directly to high-level cartel kingpins. But the Obama-era agency failed to monitor at least 2,000 of the weapons, which did in fact make their way into the hands of dangerous characters.

One of the weapons in the ill-fated sting was used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010.

When, in 2012, then-Attorney General Eric Holder was subpoenaed during a House Oversight Committee investigation into the matter, he refused to comply, disallowing the committee from seeing thousands of pages of records pertaining to the operation. He later became the first U.S. cabinet official to be held in contempt of Congress, but the Obama DOJ failed to prosecute him.

Obama ordered the extrajudicial drone strike killings of four terror-tied Americans in Yemen without due process.

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TRUMP OFFERS TO HELP OBAMA WITH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY’S ‘DISASTER’

Valerie Reynolds speaks to Fox News Digital during the opening weekend of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Friday. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)

Twenty-six-year-old Chicago resident Valerie Reynolds told Fox News Digital she thinks the center will improve the image of the city’s South Side, which often finds itself in news headlines for violence and poverty.

“I think Barack Obama’s legacy is and will continue to be the inspiration of togetherness, of the power of what can be done and what can be created when we all come together,” she said. “It’s absolutely something that we are missing today. I’ve seen divisions in this country in ways that I’ve never seen before, and I was reminded of just how vast those divisions are being out here today, because it’s the first time I’ve felt this closeness since he ran for office in 2008.”

An emotional Kia Ware, a woman from Virginia, said the grand opening of the center was a sad reminder of the direction of the U.S. since Obama left office.

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OBAMA REMAINS DEM HEADLINER WHILE PRESIDENT WITH MOST VOTES EVER FADES INTO BACKGROUND: ‘IT WAS ALL A DREAM’

Kia Ware speaks with Fox News Digital during the opening weekend of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on Friday. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)

“It makes me sad because I was so proud of everything that was accomplished during that legacy in terms of, you know, fighting for vulnerable people and vulnerable lands and protection of so many things that are now being erased forever, and I feel like it’s setting us back,” she said.

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Ware added that Obama is still a “powerhouse” in the Democratic Party, and said that people who believe in his legacy want him to “step back in.”

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“I guess it just means, like for me, I just am feeling very thankful that we have those eight years of history for putting women forward, putting minorities forward,” she said. “I felt like that unification, just seeing all people of different backgrounds and ages and generations here, I get that same feeling.”

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Can a new commission remedy California’s public defender crisis?

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Can a new commission remedy California’s public defender crisis?

A new commission made up of legislators, public defenders, academics and advocates seeks to push California — one of just two states that don’t pay for basic public defense — to begin providing resources and enforcing minimum standards for county public defender systems.

The California Independent Commission on Public Defense includes three assemblymembers and two senators — among them Jesse Arreguín and Nick Schultz, chairs of the Senate and Assembly Public Safety Committees — as well as chief public defenders from several counties, retired judges, the directors of criminal justice nonprofits, and the heads of organizations representing thousands of defense attorneys in the state.

“We have discussed the problem of our public defense system for years,” said Schultz, a Democrat from Burbank and former prosecutor who has sponsored legislation to improve public defense.

The goal is to “move past discussion and study, and come up with an actionable road map of what we need to do to really build out the robust public defense infrastructure that Californians are rightfully entitled to,” he said.

The commissioners plan to develop a five-year plan to phase in state funding, along with enforceable standards like caseload limits and access to defense investigators.

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A CalMatters investigation last year found that criminal defendants across the state are routinely convicted without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions. Many California counties do not employ a single defense investigator who can interview witnesses, review police reports, visit crime scenes and retrieve video surveillance footage. CalMatters also found that lawyers in some rural counties are handling caseloads that far exceed even the most permissive standards, making them less likely than other defense attorneys to challenge the prosecution’s evidence in legal motions and take their cases to trial.

But the state has resisted stepping in. After a proposed bill that would have created an official state commission to address the issue was abandoned, two advocacy groups, the Wren Collective and UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, decided to form an independent commission and began assembling participants who could develop and act on reforms. These types of commissions, which have facilitated significant improvements in other states’ public defender systems, are usually established by the governor.

“It became clear that this was an issue that was not a high priority for Sacramento, especially during a budget crisis,” said Chesa Boudin, the Berkeley center’s founding director and a former San Francisco district attorney. It also became clear, Boudin said, that “there was a tremendous gap between what experts understood to be the crisis and the public perception of California government as a kind of progressive leader in the country.”

In the decades since the U.S. Supreme Court established the right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings, California has saddled its counties with the responsibility of providing lawyers to poor people accused of crimes. Many of those counties have opted for the cheapest path: paying private lawyers and firms a flat fee to represent indigent defendants, regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they spend on each case.

“You’ve got some offices that have an incredibly high caliber of representation that they can provide, and you have other offices that are doing these flat-fee contracts where the quality has been documented to be pretty bad,” said Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

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Primus is the only member of the new commission from outside of California. She was asked to join because of her extensive research and writing about the structure of indigent defense.

An indigent defense commission in Michigan, which was formed by the legislature in 2013, has led to significant reforms and a substantial influx in state funding.

The California commission’s work, Primus said, can serve “as a catalyst for political actors to do the right thing and start to fund and improve indigent defense delivery, or as fodder for lawsuits that then can try to get the judiciary to push the political actors to do what is necessary to provide for effective representation.”

The commission is scheduled to hold its first in-person meeting, which will be open to the public, in Berkeley in October, with additional meetings planned for Los Angeles, the Central Valley and Northern California over the next 12 months. Commissioners say they will work in subcommittees in between these quarterly sessions to develop a concrete fiscal plan for the state, draft legislative language, and establish minimum standards for how counties should structure their public defender offices, compensate their attorneys, provide access to experts, and report on their work.

Anat Rubin writes for CalMatters.

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Pope Leo sends unmistakable message on immigrants during visit honoring America’s first saint

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Pope Leo sends unmistakable message on immigrants during visit honoring America’s first saint

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Pope Leo XIV used a visit Saturday honoring St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American saint and patron saint of immigrants, to deliver his latest appeal on behalf of them, asking Catholics to look to her example at a time when migration remains one of the defining issues of his emerging papacy.

The remarks came as Leo continues to make migration a central focus of his public ministry, a position that has sparked months of public friction with President Donald Trump over immigration and foreign policy.

“What could be more relevant today than a missionary charism dedicated to serving migrants?” Leo said during an evening prayer service in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, the northern Italian town where Cabrini was born.

The American-born pope prayed at Cabrini’s tomb and urged young Catholics to learn from the saint’s life of serving immigrants, many of whom had left their homelands in search of better opportunities.

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POPE LEO XIV STRONGLY SUPPORTS US BISHOPS’ CONDEMNATION OF TRUMP IMMIGRATION RAIDS: ‘EXTREMELY DISRESPECTFUL’

Pope Leo XIV presides over a celebration at the parish of Santi Antonio Abate e Francesca Cabrini in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, Saturday. The visit was part of his pastoral journey to nearby Pavia and marked the birthplace of Francesca Cabrini, the first U.S. saint and Patroness of Migrants. (Mario Tomassetti/Vatican Media)

But Leo also invoked his predecessor, Pope Francis, whose own papacy was defined in part by calls to welcome migrants.

“Let us ask ourselves: if Mother Francesca were alive today, what would her missionary spirit tell her?” Leo said. “And what would a pope like Francis — who, as the son of Italian immigrants, made service to migrants one of the key priorities of his pontificate — ask of her?”

The comments are the latest in a series of migration-focused appearances that have helped define Leo’s first year as pope.

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POPE LEO APPOINTS PRO-IMMIGRATION BISHOP TO DIOCESE HOME TO TRUMP’S MAR-A-LAGO

Pope Leo XIV greets faithful as he leaves the parish of Santi Antonio Abate e Francesca Cabrini in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, Saturday. (Mario Tomassetti/Vatican Media)

Last week, Leo traveled to Spain’s Canary Islands, a major destination for migrants departing West Africa, where he met migrants and called for greater efforts to welcome and integrate people fleeing hardship and conflict.

During that trip, Leo urged world leaders to create “legal and safe pathways” for migration and warned against reducing migrants to statistics.

Leo’s migration advocacy has frequently drawn criticism from Trump, who has accused the pontiff of venturing into politics and sharply disagreed with some of his comments on immigration and foreign affairs.

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The public disagreements have become one of the most closely watched relationships between the Vatican and Washington during Leo’s papacy.

INCLUSIVE TONE OF NEW POPE ISN’T SITTING WELL WITH SOME IN THE ‘AMERICA FIRST’ MOVEMENT

Pope Leo XIV presides over a celebration at the parish of Santi Antonio Abate e Francesca Cabrini in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Italy, Saturday, during his pastoral journey to nearby Pavia. (Mario Tomassetti/Vatican Media)

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was expected to meet with Vatican officials and Italian leaders during a period of heightened tensions between the Holy See and the Trump administration.

Leo has rejected suggestions that his remarks are political attacks, arguing instead that his appeals stem from Catholic teaching on human dignity, peace and care for vulnerable people.

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Saturday’s visit centered on Cabrini, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen and spent decades serving Italian immigrants through schools, hospitals and orphanages before her death in Chicago in 1917.

US CATHOLIC BISHOPS PRESIDENT SAYS DEPORTATIONS INSTILLING ‘FEAR’ IN ‘WIDESPREAD MANNER’: ‘CONCERNS US ALL’

Pope Leo XIV holds a private audience with Vice President J.D. Vance at the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, May 19, 2025. (Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media)

The Vatican has also announced that Leo will travel to the Italian island of Lampedusa on July 4, a date likely to draw attention in the United States given the pope’s American roots.

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Lampedusa has become one of Europe’s most recognizable migration flashpoints because of the thousands of migrants who attempt dangerous crossings from North Africa each year. The island also carries symbolic importance within the Catholic Church because it was the destination of Pope Francis’ first trip outside Rome after becoming pope in 2013.

Fox News Digital’s Eric Mack and Robert McGreevy, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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