Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/orange-county-probation-department/)
It’s the first set of probes the Office of Independent Review, which has sat vacant since 2018, has announced in years. An Aug. 27 report announced three investigations.
Orange County Sheriff’s officials outspent their revenues by $33 million during this last fiscal year – prompting county officials to pull millions of dollars from other departments like the Health Care Agency to cover the shortfall.
Two supervisors claimed Sacramento is using misleading statistics to justify a shift of prisoner parole and probation responsibilities to counties. Orange County appears to be the only large county in California to withhold the data.
Assembly Bill 899, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed last week, mandates that records for those in the juvenile justice system remain confidential “regardless of the juvenile’s immigration status.”
When 14-year-old Alex was placed in deportation proceedings in 2012, his mother, Marisa, feared he would be immediately deported. That didn’t happen.
Juveniles placed in deportation proceedings by ICE are turned over to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and placed in facilities throughout the country. It’s a process that’s been questioned by attorneys, mental health experts and youth advocates.
The day Marisa’s 14-year-old son was taken into custody from Orange County’s juvenile hall by immigration authorities in the summer of 2012, she set about trying to get answers.
Advocates say U.S. immigration officials routinely violate the constitutional rights of juveniles by interrogating them in juvenile detention before informing them of their rights.
Over the past several years, probation departments across California, from Orange County to Sacramento, have significantly overhauled the process used to determine when and if the agency should contact immigration authorities if a juvenile in custody is suspected of being undocumented.
A mother says that if she’d had a better understanding of her son’s juvenile justice proceedings, the information would have guided her decisions in court in the spring of 2012 when he was found delinquent for carrying a weapon – a pocket knife – on school grounds.