Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Thursday that his department has “no choice” but to turn inmates over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when it receives federal judicial warrants seeking the transfer of inmates in its county jails.
Luna addressed what he described as widespread community concerns over the department’s policies on cooperation with federal immigration authorities during a news conference at the Hall of Justice. His remarks came one day after a report by The Times revealed that in May and June the Sheriff’s Department transferred 20 inmates to ICE in compliance with the warrants.
L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman and other legal experts said federal law requires local law enforcement agencies to comply with warrants issued by federal judges, which trump state and local “sanctuary” policies aimed at shielding immigrants from deportation. The warrants involve criminal charges, the department said, not civil immigration violations.
“It’s a federal judicial warrant signed by a judge. There’s no choice. That means somebody has gone before a judge to get an arrest warrant for them,” Luna said.
He added that the inmates his department turned over have “got enough probable cause to get an arrest warrant for and they’ve committed, usually, a significant crime,” such as attempted murder, rape or robbery. “This isn’t the ice cream vendor, the lady making tacos on the street.”
The sheriff also addressed a statement released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday stating that it had “issued requests” to sheriffs in California counties including Los Angeles and San Francisco counties asking them to provide lists of all inmates in their jails who are not U.S. citizens, in addition to information about their criminal histories and when they are due to be released.
The Justice Department said in the statement that it hopes the sheriffs will cooperate with the request voluntarily, but that “if necessary, the Department will pursue all available means of obtaining the data, including through subpoenas.”
Luna said that “at this time, we have not officially received this letter. We’ve heard about it, but haven’t actually seen it.”
“Once we receive the letter, we will absolutely review it to determine what information, if any, we can legally provide,” he said.
The sheriff noted that any potential effort to compile such a list would be complicated by the fact that his department does not collect information about people’s immigration status when they are booked into county jails, and that he does not know if the agency has the technical capacity to compile such a roster.
Earlier Thursday, Luna said at the monthly meeting of the L.A. County Civilian Oversight Commission that when “you get booked, processed and you get Livescanned, that’s a national system, so agents of the federal government will know you’re in custody. So it’s not that we’re notifying them, it’s an automatic notification based on your fingerprints.”
He said during the Thursday news conference that he believes ICE uses information gathered during that booking process to compile lists of people to issue civil immigration detainers for.
Under sanctuary policies, the Sheriff’s Department is legally barred from handing over inmates in response to so-called detainers, or ICE requests to hold a person for potential deportation.
Luna said that in 2024, his department received “995 civil detainer requests from ICE and did not comply with any of them because that would violate both state law and county policy.”
Luna also offered repeated reassurances to county residents who have raised concerns about the unsubstantiated prospect that the Sheriff’s Department is engaging in wider cooperation with ICE.
He said that he personally believes “we should all be concerned” about “federal agents either chasing people around a car wash or a Home Depot,” and that his department does not assist ICE in those kinds of street operations, which have instilled deep fear in immigrant communities across L.A. County since they began last month.
“I completely understand the concern, the fear and anxiety from our community here in Los Angeles County,” he said. “We do not honor ICE detainers or requests for transfers. We do not allow immigration officials to operate within our facilities, and we do not permit the use of county property databases or personnel by ICE.”
