California pioneered modern gang surveillance. Trump may be exploiting it

San Francisco Chronicle​

2 days ago

Six years before he was wrongly deported to a foreign prison over unproven gang ties, Kilmar Abrego Garcia got a firsthand lesson in American gang intelligence.
In March 2019, Abrego Garcia stood outside a southern Maryland Home Depot chatting with three fellow day laborers when local police arrested them. Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime or accused of one. But he was placed on a list of 'verified' gang members, something he discovered at an immigration hearing a month later.
According to his attorneys, Abrego Garcia left El Salvador as a teen to escape the gangs that threatened to kidnap and ransom him. The evidence that he belonged to one of them came down to who he was with and what he wore. The practice of labeling him originated in California, the first U.S. state to legally define gangs and equate them with terrorist organizations.
The Prince George's County Police Department, which arrested Abrego Garcia and handed him to federal immigration authorities, said a confidential informant told them that Abrego Garcia belonged to MS-13, an international gang started by Salvadorans in 1980s Los Angeles that was partial to bull horns as a symbol. That Abrego Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie when he was arrested indicated he 'was a member in good standing,' an arrest report stated.
The first Trump administration lost its bid to legally deport Abrego Garcia. The second Trump administration circumvented the legal process.
In 2019, an immigration judge determined that Abrego Garcia was more likely to be a victim of gang crime than a purveyor of it, and granted him protection from future deportation.
On March 12, three days before President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming the U.S. was at war with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, ICE agents arrested Abrego Garcia on his way home from work. The sheet metal worker had his autistic 5-year-old son in the backseat.
Over the next four days, Abrego Garcia's attorneys say, he was moved to different locations in different states, questioned about gang affiliations, allowed two phone calls to his wife and flown to El Salvador, where he was frog-marched into a maximum-security prison for terrorists known as CECOT.
At least 287 other U.S. migrants have experienced the same fate, though immigration advocates and attorneys suspect there are more.
'Many of these families really had their loved ones disappear,' Michelle Brané, a Biden administration immigration detention ombudsman who now leads the family reunification nonprofit Together & Free, said during a video briefing. 'It's just literally what it looks like to these families.'
Numerous federal judges have recoiled at the White House's interpretation of U.S. law, issuing injunctions both preliminary and permanent against its invocation of the arcane Alien Enemies Act of 1798, threatening it with criminal contempt for not complying with orders to return migrants and directing it to do everything it can to bring back Abrego Garcia.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is attempting to deport scores of others for disputed gang affiliations. Attorneys for the detained immigrants say their clients are actually victims or potential victims of the gangs they're accused of belonging to. Some have had relatives killed; others say their sexual orientation would make them targets.
While the administration initially chalked up Abrego Garcia's deportation as an ' administrative error,' it has since doubled down on claims that he belongs to MS-13, releasing his 2019 arrest report and offering as ' bombshell ' evidence a 2022 traffic stop in which Abrego Garcia was released with a warning.
Attorneys for the banished migrants say Trump's actions are illegal. Civil libertarians say they are also a foreseeable, if extreme, extension of California's decades-long efforts to track criminal street gangs in computerized databases that have been found to be riddled with errors, assumptions and, in some cases, falsified reports.
The state has tried to undo much of what it pioneered across the country — including the use of flawed gang intelligence in deportations. But the reforms are falling into a growing loophole, says a Southern California attorney who is trying to close it.
Law of the land
The grandson of a high-ranking Los Angeles and Newport Beach police official, Garcia-Leys already thought that cops placed too much stock in their own judgment. But it wasn't until the westside native moved to the lower-income, tightly packed Watts neighborhood in southern L.A., to teach at the lowest-performing high schools in the county, that he saw how heavily perception weighed in gang policing.
'In Watts, nobody trusted the police to do the right thing ever,' said Garcia-Leys, now the executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center in Orange County, where he pursues local and statewide policing reforms. 'And it was just because they mistreated people, their demeanor, and they didn't seem to care if they got the right person.'
Garcia-Leys said his students were resigned to their reality. They kept little more than a buck on them for their two-a-day 'pocket checks' — robbed by the gangbangers waiting for them outside of school, searched by the gang officers closer to home.
'It's the exact same sort of intimidation and harassment, and you'd experience it first at the hands of the gang and second at the hands of the police,' Garcia-Leys said. 'They were actually making the problem worse.'
Garcia-Leys started his teaching career in 2001, four years after L.A.'s approach to gang policing became the California standard. He left teaching in 2010, after that standard had been adopted nationally.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department created the nation's first computerized database of suspected gang members in 1987, a year before California adopted the nation's first law defining street gangs and creating stiff penalties for belonging to them. A decade later, L.A.'s database was the template for CalGang, a statewide intranet system that quickly became the country's most widely used gang database.
To be entered into CalGang, individuals have to meet just two criteria on a nine-item checklist. They included: self-identifying as a gang member; being arrested with gang members; associating with gang members; being identified as a gang member by a reliable informant; being identified by an untested informant; frequenting gang areas; displaying gang signs; wearing gang attire; and having gang tattoos.
CalGang ballooned into what critics contended was an indiscriminate dragnet of communities of color. In 2010, more than 235,000 people were logged in CalGang as active gang members — 41,000 of them living in L.A. — with up to 200 items of personal information about each individual. A 2015 study in the Journal of Forensic Social Work found that it didn't result in a reduction of gang-related crime in L.A.
In Sacramento County, where the sheriff's and police departments managed their own databases, the low threshold and broad criteria resulted in expansive lists of mostly Black and brown boys and men, who could be and were labeled gang members for wearing their high school colors, making or appearing in rap videos, or being fans of the rap-rock duo Insane Clown Posse.
One Sacramento man spent more than a decade mistakenly validated as a member of the gang responsible for shooting him. Another Sacramento man had his gang validation extended five years after he was pulled over while wearing a Sacramento Kings hat.
A 2016 state audit found widespread problems with CalGang, including a lack of oversight, unjustified and inaccurate entries, and data privacy violations.
But the system had already influenced federal immigration authorities. Not only did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have 'read-only' access to CalGang between January 2006 and October 2016, it modeled its own gang database, called ICEGangs, after California's, according to a September 2024 paper by UC Irvine criminologists.
A third-year law student at UC Irvine in 2016, Garcia-Leys co-authored a paper about the ripple effects of CalGang's unreliable intel on immigration proceedings — used to fast-track deportations, justify detentions and withhold legal status from otherwise eligible Dreamers.
Wrongful gang allegations also show up in wrongful convictions.
At its July 2024 meeting, the California Victims Compensation Board granted financial restitution to two different men wrongfully convicted of gang-related murders in 2001. One was Ronald Velasquez, who was awarded $1.2 million after losing 8,587 days to a wrongful first-degree murder conviction. Abraham Villalobos was granted $788,000 for a wrongful conviction of second-degree murder with a gang enhancement, for which he spent 5,629 days incarcerated. Before the conviction was overturned in March 2024, Villalobos was deported to Mexico.
Opting out of reforms
Over the past decade, the California Legislature has attempted to correct the embattled CalGang system by mandating a notification and appeals process for the people entered into it, and shifting oversight from the L.A.-heavy law enforcement representatives on the executive board and advisory committee to the state Department of Justice. Assembly Bill 90 in 2017 prohibited information in shared gang databases from being used for immigration enforcement purposes, under threat of access being suspended or revoked.
The reforms have had intended and unintended consequences.
The number of accused people in the database has plunged 87% since the end of 2017, when there were almost 104,000 entries. And people are getting auto-purged from the system at higher numbers than they're being added.
Still, CalGang entries have a high failure rate. In 2024, the state DOJ audited 675 gangs identified by law enforcement agencies, and found that 154 — more than a fifth — didn't meet its standards for qualifying as a gang. Another 60 audits were still pending.
Racial disproportionality remains an ongoing concern. Of the 13,691 people in the database, 69% are Hispanic and 28% are Black. Comparatively, 40% of California's population is Hispanic and 6% is Black.
White individuals made up 6.9% of the 13,691 people in CalGang in September 2024 — the same percentage as six years earlier.
'It highlights the bias in the system, that white gangs typically aren't considered gangs,' said Mike German, a former FBI agent and author of 'Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within.' 'There's a tendency because of the bias that's inherent in the system to view white crime as the acts of individuals while holding collective blame when they're nonwhite crimes.'
The number of law enforcement agencies using CalGang has also plummeted.
At the time of the 2016 state audit, 92% of law enforcement agencies said CalGang was the only gang database they used. Today, only 10 of California's roughly 600 law enforcement agencies are active users, according to the California Department of Justice's response to a public records request.
Garcia-Leys fears this means that many agencies have instead chosen to operate internal gang databases to avoid state oversight.
'They should not be sharing their databases but we don't know if that's the case,' he said. 'Here's the problem, right? Nobody's using CalGang anymore.'
He's circulating a legislative proposal to close what he describes as the 'shared database loophole,' to make sure these ad hoc databases can't be used to fuel Trump's extraordinary renditions. He said it's drawn lawmaker interest but, because of the summer session deadline, could be a couple years away.
In response to public records requests, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, an early CalGang administrator, said it does operate a shared database accessible by state and regional agencies. The San Francisco Police Department, whose notorious 'Chinatown Squad' in the late 1800s was the first 'ethnic crime' police force in the U.S., said it does not track gangs. And the Los Angeles Police Department — which got kicked out of CalGang in 2020 for falsifying records — said it does not document suspected gang members, contract with software vendors to do so or train its police force how to document gang members.
Los Angeles police are still training the nation's gang officers, however.
The LAPD is well-represented among the leadership of the L.A.-grown California Gang Investigators Association, whose 33rd national conference in Anaheim in August has some two dozen planned classes dedicated to 'the street gang problem.' They include seminars about gang enforcement operations, investigating minors, Black gangs, the Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and one called the 'Tren de Aragua Menace.'