The TRUST Act, or the Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools Act, will prevent local law enforcement agencies from detaining undocumented individuals on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than 48 hours if they are eligible for release or have not committed a serious felony.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, introduced the bill as a response to the Secure Communities federal program, which allows the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to screen detainees based on their immigration status by running their fingerprints through a federal database.

“While Washington waffles on immigration, California’s forging ahead,” Brown said in a press release. “I’m not waiting.”

Last fall, Brown vetoed an earlier iteration of the law, requesting that certain types of serious crimes that were not part of that version, such as child abuse, be included in the list of serious felonies.

The law Brown signed had been amended to include the changes and is designed to  help rebuild trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. According to the law, undocumented residents are less likely to cooperate with police when it “could result in deportation.”

Secure Communities has led to the deportation of more than 90,000 California residents — more than in any other state, according to data from the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties.

Last Tuesday, UC President Janet Napolitano, previously Secretary of Homeland Security, met with students who were part of the Statewide Multicultural Student Coalition, a universitywide group of undocumented students and their supporters that formed in response to her appointment.

At the meeting, Napolitano informed the students that she had discussed the TRUST Act with Brown, telling him she thought it would be “good for the state of California,” said UC spokesperson Shelly Meron.

Leti Volpp, a professor of law at UC Berkeley, said California should encourage legislation that recognizes immigrants as part of the community rather than removing them from it.

However, Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., raised concerns about public safety issues and how law enforcement officials would be able to arbitrarily determine which individuals will be subject to immigration enforcement.

“(The law would) force them to release people who should be left in custody,” Vaughan said.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, undocumented individuals accounted for 6.8 percent of California’s population and 9.7 percent of the state’s labor force in 2010.

There are about 200 undocumented students on campus as of 2012, according to Meng So, the campus’s first undocumented student program coordinator.

Volpp said she hopes the TRUST Act will “remove daily insecurities” for undocumented students in California.

Contact Jeff Landa at jlanda@dailycal.org.

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Kore Chan/Staff

California may become the first state in U.S. history to allow undocumented immigrants to practice law after passing the state bar exam.

Gov. Jerry Brown has until Oct. 13 to sign AB 1024, a bill that would grant undocumented individuals licenses to become lawyers regardless of their immigration status.

“This is the only country that they have known as their own, and until the federal government passes comprehensive immigration reform, it is something we have to do to ensure dreamers can have normal lives,” said Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, who introduced the bill.

The bill was introduced after the Supreme Court of California in 2011 ruled to withhold the law license of Sergio Covarrubias Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, after the state bar that approved his license disclosed his legal status.

But it was not until Sept. 4 of this year that the state Supreme Court heard oral arguments from both sides of Garcia’s case. The court decided that while it is against federal law to issue professional licenses to undocumented immigrants, the law allows room for state legislatures to grant professional licenses to undocumented immigrants through state legislation.

Garcia’s case has not existed in a vacuum. Similar cases have appeared across the country involving undocumented immigrants; Jose Manuel Godinez-Samperio in Florida and Cesar Vargas in New York faced difficulty obtaining their licenses to practice law. Earlier this year, Godinez-Samperio’s case was dismissed, leaving him without a license.

Because of these struggles, Vargas has decided to help create the DREAM Bar Association, a group that supports and provides resources for other undocumented law students nationwide.

Despite the hanging threat of deportation, these students have chosen to voice their experiences in pursuing a law career. Vargas’ group has already recruited about 30 members, who often work together to write briefs for one another about reasons they should qualify for law licenses.

“We cannot stand in the shadow — I have seen other DREAMers fighting for others, and I think those people inspired me to take action and do my part and push for immigration reform and have DREAMers admitted (into college),” Vargas said. “The more people know about your story, the more people understand that it is a personal issue. My goal is to push the conversation forward.”

Gonzalez, who earned her own law degree from UCLA School of Law, chose to push for the bill just before the legislative recess in mid-September. She said it was important to support the students who have worked hard to earn their degrees.

“I’m not any better, I didn’t study any more and there is a lack of equity that doesn’t allow these DREAMers who worked hard and did everything right to pursue what they want, and it just doesn’t seem right,” Gonzalez said.

It is unclear how many undocumented students are studying law in the UC system, but Gonzalez estimates there are 15 systemwide. The figure does not take into account students who did not want to identify as undocumented, undergraduates thinking about pursuing a law degree or law school graduates.

Leti Volpp, a law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, said she wouldn’t be surprised if more undocumented students see law school as a viable option if the bill passes.

Volpp also said AB 1024  is another small step toward seeing undocumented immigrants as part of “our community.” The students who are able to pass the bar exam should not be excluded due to their legal status but should be praised for their accomplishment, she said.

“Half of the applicants to the California state bar get rejected every year,” Volpp said. “Legal status is the least important question on whether or not someone should be allowed to practice law.”

Contact Jose Hernandez at jhernandez@dailycal.org

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The STEM Jobs Act — H.R. 6429 — was passed by the Republican majority in a 245-139 vote on Friday and would allocate up to 55,000 green cards for foreign students pursuing advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The act would allow American employers to help create jobs, increase competitiveness, spur innovation and ensure the status of the United States as a global leader, said House Judiciary Committee chair and co-author of the act Lamar Smith, R-Texas.

“These students have the ability to start a company that creates jobs or come up with an invention that could jump-start a whole new industry,” Smith said. “For America to remain the world’s economic leader, we must have access to the world’s best talent.”

The majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives support STEM visas for foreign graduates of U.S. universities but not at the expense of other groups of other groups waiting for green cards, said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, in a statement.

“The partisan Republican STEM bill takes the country backwards in our immigration policy and will prevent immigrants hoping to use rollover unused visas to reunite with their families,” Lee said in the statement. “We cannot do this at the expense of farmers and agricultural workers, DREAMers, and for families separated by green card backlogs.”

The diversity visa program serves a symbol of hope for hopeful green card holders, said UC Berkeley School of Law professor Leti Volpp. She added that there are few programs that allocate scarce resources by luck.

“I think this is really lamentable,” Volpp said. “Rather than thinking about creating more visas, Congress is choosing to take one people and put them against another. There is a presumption that there has to be a tradeoff of one sector for another. I think we can absorb more legal residents per year, and this act does not reflect the fact.”

If the act is passed by the Senate, the ramifications for UC Berkeley are uncertain, Volpp said.

“There seems to be some comprehensive immigration reform planned, and I don’t know if this is the opening act,” Volpp said.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, suggested increasing the number of STEM visas without eliminating existing legal immigration visa programs, according to transcripts of Friday’s debate. Under the proposed legislation, unused visas will not trickle down to visa hopefuls in other countries who have been waiting for the visa backlog to clear, according to Lofgren.

“I can’t support a bill that pits immigrant communities against each other — that sets a terrible precedent for addressing our broken immigration system that is indefensibly designed to reduce immigration while purporting to increase it and that harms American workers,” Lofgren said in the debate. “For that reason, it pains me greatly to say that I cannot support this flawed bill.”

Contact Aliyah Mohammed at amohammed@dailycal.org.

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