As a Bay Area Supreme Court Justice, I sentenced hundreds of people to our jails and prisons for nearly two decades. Simon Liu was one of them, and his experience has led me to advocate that others be spared what he subsequently endured.

I sentenced Liu to 26 years in prison in 1998 after he was convicted of crimes stemming from a home invasion. A then 16-year-old who had immigrated to the U.S. from China as a young boy was charged as an adult.

After serving more than seventeen years of his sentence, Liu was released after a strict review by the state parole board. While in prison, he had turned his life around. He learned to read and write in English, completed his GED and was trained in programming and other skills.

Despite being released, Liu was subsequently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency told him he would be deported to China, where he had no family and only vague memories of his life.

Fortunately, a pardon was granted by the governor. Gavin Newsom, who I supported, put the brakes on his deportation. Today, Liu is a compassionate, productive and self-sufficient member of his Bay Area community. The governor’s pardon noted that he lives an upright life and has demonstrated his fitness for the restoration of civil rights and responsibilities.

A bill from Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) will prevent more people like Liu from being deported after detention, even if they are not fortunate enough to receive a governor’s pardon. Under its legislation, Assembly Bill 1306, if certain eligible noncitizens serve their time in prison and earn their release, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is prohibited from turning them over to federal authorities for deportation.

While existing state laws limit California law enforcement officers from conducting and cooperating with immigration enforcement, state prisons are excluded from these protections and routinely cooperate with ICE. Carrillo’s bill, which will be voted on in the Senate on Monday, would ban California prisons from facilitating the ICE detention of immigrants released under broad-based criminal justice reforms.

This bill will thus end the unjust double-punishment of detention and deportation of not only undocumented immigrants, but also green card holders and even naturalized U.S. citizens. Recent reporting by the LA Times

showed the alarming extent to which the state prison system goes out of its way to report U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to ICE, often racially profiling people in custody. According to a report by the ACLU of Northern California and others, the agency has relied on racist assumptions and ignored their own data.

AB 1306 is an important step toward addressing these abuses and fully realizing recent reforms that allow for resentencing and release to address past injustices. It will ensure that both qualified citizens and non-citizens have the opportunity to reunite with their families and communities.

Take the case of Sandra Castaeda, who was convicted of manslaughter in 2002 after a man shot from the window of her van and killed a teenager as she drove friends to Taco Bell in South-Central LA. The shooter was never arrested. and although Castaeda, then twenty, did not commit the crime herself and had no criminal record, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.

Sixteen years later, after the state legislature tightened the state’s murder law, a state judge overturned Castaeda’s conviction and ordered her release. But instead of letting her go home, prison officials arranged for Castaeda, a legal resident who had been in the U.S. since she was 9, to be transferred to ICE custody on the day she was released. As a result, she spent another year in prison and fought deportation in an immigration detention center in rural Georgia before an immigration judge finally released her.

Castaeda poignantly recalls the ordeal in an interview with KQED: You’re already dealing with the rollercoaster emotions of coming home. And then they say to you: Oh, never mind, you’re going to ICE. So now I have to sit here and wonder if I’m going to be deported. And while you’re in the detention center, you hear that these people are committing suicide because they don’t want to go back to their country.

The Senate must pass the bill and the Governor must sign this bill to ensure that the state stops wrongfully denying second chances to rehabilitated immigrants who have paid their debt to society.

LaDoris H. Cordell is a retired judge of the Superior Court of Santa Clara County and the

author

of her honor: My Life on the Couch… What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It.