Please sign on to send an email to the Governor and CDCR Secretary urging them to use their administrative power to end CDCR’s two-tiered system of justice for immigrants and refugees!

The ACLU of Northern California recently released a shocking report, covered by the Los Angeles Times, that shows how our state prison system, the CA Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), voluntarily goes to extreme lengths to systematically discriminate against immigrants, refugees, and anyone, including U.S. citizens, who prison officials assume are born outside of the U.S.

These previously unseen emails reveal how our largest public agency is using public resources to betray our values and operate a system of double punishment. Several emails show how CDCR staff flag people for ICE based on racist assumptions about their names, the languages people speak, and where they were born - and ICE itself questions those decisions. If ICE doesn’t respond, CDCR staff will repeatedly follow up. State prison staff will often detain Californians beyond their release date to provide ICE with more time to pick them up.

Governor Newsom and CDCR claims to build “safer communities through rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry,” but CDCR’s racist collusion with ICE flies in the face of these goals. This practice traumatizes people who have invested in their own transformation and are ready to return home. It separates and destabilizes families, and deprives our communities of beloved leaders who are eager to positively contribute to society. Once transferred to ICE, community members face severe medical neglect and systematic abuse in detention, including horrific sexual abuse at Stewart Detention Facility in Georgia. The Department of Homeland Security’s own experts found 'barbaric' and 'negligent' conditions in ICE detention. Many people who are deported face abuse and even death.