Category: CCWP In the News
Real News Interview with CCWP Advocate Erin Neff about sexual abuse at FCI Dublin
A recent investigation into sexual abuse at a women’s federal prison in Dublin, California, brought down several guards and the prison’s former warden, Ray J. Garcia. But a new lawsuit from eight women now alleges that the investigation has not stopped the culture of sexual abuse. Erin Neff of the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners joins Rattling the Bars to discuss the new lawsuit and the underlying culture of sexual abuse found throughout US prisons.
Studio: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars, I’m your host Mansa Musa. Do you know who Joan Little was? Joan Little was charged with the 1974 murder of Clarence Alligood, a White prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, who attempted to rape Little before she could escape. Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. Recently, eight female prisoners, dubbed the Rape Club by prisoners and correctional staff alike, found a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prison arguing that sexual abuse and exploitation have not stopped in Dublin FCI, despite the prosecution of former warden and several former officers.
The lawsuit filed in Oakland by attorneys representing prison and the advocacy group California Coalition for Women Prisoners also named the current warden and 12 former and current guards. It alleged the Bureau of Prison and staff at Dublin Facility didn’t do enough to prevent sexual abuse going back to 1990. An Associated Press investigation last year found a culture of abuse and coverups that persisted for years at the prison. What does the #MeToo movement garnering public attention mean in terms of obtaining justice and relief for incarcerated women? Here to talk about the current state of Dublin FCI and related issues is Erin Neff, who is a legal advocate with California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.
Erin Neff:
Thank you, Mansa, good to be here.
Mansa Musa:
Tell our audience a little bit about yourself.
Erin Neff:
My name’s Erin Neff, I work with California Coalition for Women Prisoners. We are a grassroots organization that has been active in the California prisons for the last 28 years. We began at Chowchilla with the CDCR giving support to a woman named Charisse Shumate, who was advocating for the lack of medical care. Since then, she actually did not survive her illness, but she began a movement with us, with people on the outside to create advocacy relationships. We have been working mostly with the CDCR system in the women’s prison system, and we are currently in the last few years working at FCI Dublin.
Mansa Musa:
Okay. Now recently, an article came out or information came out about the current state of Dublin Prison in Oakland, California, or in the Bay Area, as it relates to female prisoners being abused, sexually abused. We know that in the federal prison system they have what’s known as PREA, Prison Reform Enforcement Rape Act, I think that’s what it stands for, but the concept of PREA is that anyone under the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prison, anyone under any state or local facility that has an issue about being sexually abused or sexually assaulted by either inmates or staff, they have this mechanism where they can immediately contact someone, had a person allegedly done something to them removed from the institution and have the person that’s making the allegation removed from the institution, and then an investigation going on, and in the interim of that, until that is resolved, these people are never put in the place together.
But now, come to find out that in California, in Dublin in particular, in terms of this particular incident, it’s known that this is far more reaching than just in Dublin Prison, this is a … I think I read somewhere that say it’s the culture of the prison system. Talk about Dublin first, let’s talk about that and what’s going on as far as the lawsuit and how this came about, and if you can give historical context to it, if you have one.
Erin Neff:
Yeah. So PREA is the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and that should generally give a person who is experiencing sexual harassment or abuse a way to confidentially report this abuse, and that appropriate action and investigation will be taken against this person who is doing the abuse. In the case of Dublin, just to give it a historical context, 30 years ago there was a horrific incident of abuse on many people, and there was a big case and a big settlement, and it is heartbreaking to see that 30 years later the same thing is happening. What it exposes is a culture of turning a blind eye to this abuse, there’s cooperation, there’s coverup, there is very difficult to report, let alone confidentially report.
So in recent times, what you’re seeing are people being abused who are undocumented. So first of all, they are being targeted because the staff knows that they are people who are going to be deported. So there is an exposure there. They are threatened that if they say anything they’ll be deported, so these people are people who’ve been here maybe their entire lives, all of their family’s here. So the possibility that they will be deported, and I’m sure this staff lets them think that they have some sort of power as to whether they can stay or go, so there’s that. They’re being retaliated against by putting in isolation, they are getting strip searched, it goes on and on. They’re being deprived of medical care, of mental healthcare. These people have really suffered tremendous abuse, and on top of this abuse they’re being punished again by not getting the medication that they were once taking. That is a very common scenario where their medication that helped them survive in this place of incarceration, they’re not getting the medical care, they’re not getting counseling.
In some cases, reports where they’ll get minimal counseling, but it’s with a man who is part of the staff, they do not feel safe at all. Their commissary is getting limited, harassment in the middle of the night. It goes on and on and on. While this has been exposed, Warden Garcia was found guilty and sentenced to 70 months for his abuse, this ongoing abuse. There was a chaplain, multiple correctional officers, the counselors who were cooperating and giving information to those who were abusing and they’re giving people away to target people who are more vulnerable, those for example who were undocumented. So you’re seeing people transferred out of state if they do report, so they’re getting transferred away from their families and their communities. It goes on and on and on.
Mansa Musa:
We’re not talking about Orange is the New Black, we’re not talking about some HBO theoretical or theatrical rendition of what an ideal prison would look like in America. We’re actually talking about real live human beings. But talk about the lawsuit, so now we’ve reached critical mass to the point where we have a lawsuit, talk about the lawsuit and in talking about the lawsuit, has an injunction been leveled against the institution to cease and desist? How are you able to get coverage for these women? Because as I said earlier, as you outlined, that type of fear permeates the population.
When you’re in the prison, and I’ve been in prison myself, I did 48 years, when you’re in the prison environment and you don’t have no control whatsoever to begin with, but the isolation really makes you feel like you don’t have no rights, and whatever’s going to go on with you that day or that period in time, either you’re going to accept it or you’re going to die trying to defend yourself. But at any rate, you’re going to be subjected to some harsh, cruel, brutal treatment, or mistreatment. Talk about the lawsuit, if an injunction is in effect, and how do these women get coverage where they can get a sense of security?
Erin Neff:
Yeah. So CCWP is the organizational plaintiff for this case against the BOP, along with many individuals. Currently, where it stands is we are waiting for a response from the BOP, it’s currently a bit in what feels like stalling stage on their part, before the trial will be granted. So we are waiting on that. In the meantime, anyone who is part of this lawsuit is also currently incarcerated, some people have been released, but many are still incarcerated at Dublin or transferred. People that I am visiting are talking about being treated as less than human. Last week I sat across from someone who is being denied her medical care, her mental healthcare, she feels completely forgotten, she feels completely hopeless, she’s been subjected to isolation.
This is a real person with children, she speaks to her children and her children are so worried about her because of her feeling of hopelessness. She’s already paying for her debt to society, she’s doing her time, and on top of that she is being treated as less than human. This isn’t a TV show, these are real people. The effect on that individual, the effect on their families, their children, it’s not isolated to that one person. So the hopelessness is very hard to fight against. What we try to do is educate them and inform them of what we are doing on the outside, and that they are not forgotten. They did recently say that they saw us when we filed the lawsuit, and we had a demonstration out in front of the courthouse in Oakland, and that was extremely empowering for them to know that people are active and that we are fighting.
Mansa Musa:
Like you said, this is not no TV show, this is not no, “Wait, go back, act like you’re distraught. Wait, go back, put more emotion.” No, this is real life. Speaking on the outside, and this is just my perspective, and we’re talking about California and we’re talking about the Bay Area, but we’re also talking about a state where if these women were in Paramount Studio, if these women was in some major corporation, if these women was in anywhere in society being subjected to this, the #MeToo movement, the feminist movement, every ambulance-chasing lawyer would be outraged, would be in uproar, would be identifying the warden, the corporate leader and trying to get charges against him, trying to get him locked up, trying to get their money, a lien on their moneys. Do you feel like that it’s a disconnect between these movements and women that are incarcerated? If so, why? If you can talk about that.
Erin Neff:
Well, yes, there’s a huge disconnect, even in the Bay Area people are not aware that this is going on. Unfortunately, what you see in the prisons, everyone knows, is we see Brown people, Black people and poor people, people who are already vulnerable, people who have suffered a tremendous abuse, and a blind eye is turned to these people. This is a capitalist society where we value people who are seemingly of value, and it’s a very, very tragic view even in California, where we are the most liberal state. We see people turning away from this, it’s incredibly painful to see that truth. People don’t want to see that, they don’t want to know that is happening in California.
Yeah. If you see someone on the outside, not to minimize the tragedy of that recent expedition to go see the Titanic, these millionaires, billionaires spent a ton of money and very tragically they died in this accident. You see an outpouring of interest and focus on this. Why are these people who are incarcerated of less human value?
Mansa Musa:
Right. Let’s give a context to people that are incarcerated, because according to the judicial system and according to criminal law, we have what we call crime and punishment. A person’s charged with a crime, the punishment they get is the amount of time they are to serve, not how they serve their time, the amount of time. If I do robbery, if I rob somebody and robbery incurs 10 years, the crime is I committed a robbery, the punishment is the 10 years. The punishment is not, “I’m sentencing you to 10 years to go be raped, sodomized, brutalized, terrorized, and then released.” The punishment is that I’m going to be sent to an institution, the next phase in my sentencing process is and the narrative is that I’ll be sentenced to an institution that’s going to provide me with the means and the mechanism to make the adjustment for my ultimate return to society.
Not where I’ll be subjected to, as a female, more importantly than anything else, be subjected to coming into an institution and the way the prisons are, this is the prison culture in terms of how we look at people that’s incarcerated, we know the institutions they be going to, we know the way the institutions are ran, we know what goes on in these institutions, probably even get there. They say, “Oh, yeah. You’re going to Dublin.” The first thing I know is, “Okay, I know that this is the way …” There’s real abuse like this here, women are being … I’ve got to be on the lookout for this, I’ve got to be on the lookout for that. Automatically what happens is once I get into this environment, I’m automatically on the defense because I recognize that the abuse about the environment proceeded itself.
But talk about the women, and you talked about earlier about how some of the clients that you deal with are really being depressed, and rightly so. But talk about how we’re able to get them to hold on and have faith and be more spirited about the fact that, not only this too going to pass, but the people that’s responsible are going to be held accountable. That’s a fact. We know that based on y’all organization and y’all organizing. But talk about how you are able to get them to hold on and recognize that they’re not wrong for wanting to be human, they’re not wrong for expressing their desire for their humanity. The people that’s wrong is the people that’s abusing them, that’s being given the authority to abuse them.
Erin Neff:
That’s right, yes. It’s an excellent point. The punishment is the time you do, and your time in prison is supposed to include opportunities for rehabilitation. That is another thing that people are allowed to do programming, and this programming can include AA, NA, ways to improve yourself, codependency. This is another form of retaliation in that they deprive you of getting to take those classes and be in groups and in community. So you are being doubly punished. What we try to do, we have in-person visiting where we are trying to meet as many people as possible and let them know that we are here. We have a writing relationship with them, they have access to email where we start being in contact as much as possible. We use this as an opportunity to find out what is going on inside.
Now, no email or phone calls are confidential, so it’s not a guarantee that we can exchange real information. We have also a newsletter called the Fire Inside that CCWP has been publishing for 28 years. We have three issues a year. We’re send those to people in CDCR as well as the FCI Dublin, it’s in Spanish and in English. We solicit information and content and poetry and stories from them to get their stories out, so that they are heard. Last week in my visit I shared the newsletter with many people, and it was great because it’s also in Spanish, and I think it was-
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Erin Neff:
Tragically, they are so moved because they are not used to having people acknowledge their existence and their suffering.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
Erin Neff:
So the fact that that is happening and we are giving them voice, we want to know what’s going on, we really want them to know that their stories are incredibly important and they are not suffering alone. Sometimes the only thing that we can do is write a letter and say, “We are here. How is your day going?” That can make a huge difference. But things like the lawsuit is incredibly important. A demonstration in front of the courthouse when the case gets filed, these things are incredibly important because it does get inside.
Mansa Musa:
We want people to recognize that we’re talking about human beings, first of all, we’re talking about people, human beings, but more importantly we’re talking about women. The fact that in this society we deal with chauvinists, sexists, racists, bigoted society, capitalist society, the fact that these things exist seems to overshadow what we’re talking about when we’re talking about people that were sentenced to serve time, the judge did not say when sentencing them, “I’m sentencing you to 10 years in Dublin Federal Correctional Institution to be raped, sodomized and brutalized, dehumanized, and hopefully by the time that you return to society you’ll be a shell of a woman.” No, the judge sentenced these people, sentenced these women to a term of imprisonment and to be rehabilitated.
But Erin, you’ve got the last word on this here, how do we get in touch with you? What do you want our viewers to take away from this here? More importantly, when you go back and talk to the sisters, tell them we send our solidarity out and big hugs.
Erin Neff:
Thank you so much. Thank you also doing the shout-out to women who are just a more vulnerable population. Most of the time women end up in prison, have been system impacted, or they have been abused or trafficked, and end up in these situations where they’re getting abused even more. If you would like to get in touch with California Coalition for Women Prisoners, we have an advocacy program where we join people on the outside who are interested in reaching this population and doing advocacy and learning from the ground up. We are a grassroots organization, you can look at WomenPrisoners.org and send us an email and we will get you connected. We have orientations and trainings, bimonthly meetings to support you in this work. It is a really big community of amazing, amazing organizers and people with tremendous heart to recognize that this problem, while isolated to what’s happening inside of a building, inside of a prison, is impacting all of our lives.
Our communities are being impacted, your neighbor is being impacted. Whether you feel it directly or not, it is. It’s welcome-everyone and please come and check us out. WomenPrisoners.org. The women at the FCI Dublin would love to be in touch with you.
Mansa Musa:
Thank you, Erin. There you have it, the Real News, Rattling the Bars. Are you rattling the bars today? We see an event where the person threw their hat up in the air, and when he threw his hat up in the air it was a moment where everybody came around and supported. This is that kind of time. This is a throw-your-hat-up-in-the-air moment for women incarcerated throughout the United States of America, more so importantly in Dublin. Nobody has the right, nobody has the right, nobody has the right to violate your body. Nobody has the right, because you’re serving a sentence, to come in and say, “Because you’re serving time, or because you’re considered an illegal alien, or because you’re a woman that I have a right to subject you to the most dehumanizing, inhumane treatment, only because I got the authority. I got the right to rape you. I got the right to sodomize you. I got the right to deny you your medication. I got the right to deny you food. I got the right.”
No, you do not have the right. You do not have the right. The right is not given to you. The right that you have is to ensure that I’m in a safe environment, and when you subject women to this cruel and unusual punishment, you’re going to be held accountable. We see this being taken place now by the work that Erin and the sisters and brothers in California are doing. We ask you to continue to support the Real News and Rattling the Bars. It’s only from the Real News and Rattling the Bars that you’re going to get this kind of information. You’re not going to get this information on ABC or CBS or NBC News. You’re not going to get this information from someone from the White House getting on a platform saying, “Yes, we find it’s problematic that women are being raped in prison and women are being sodomized in prison, and that we’re paying money for this to make sure that they do it with impunity.”
No, you’ll only get this information from the Real News and Rattling the Bars, and we ask that you look at this report. We ask that you investigate what’s going on in the prison system, and particularly in California. We ask that you take a stand. If you believe that raping people, sodomizing people and abusing people are a good thing to do because they was convicted of a crime, then weigh in on that. But understand this here, if they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you at night. So you’re not immune to it, you will be subjected to the same harsh treatment when it goes unchecked. Thank you, thank you very much, Erin, and thank you for listening.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
By Officer Bimblebury Posted by Vanguard Administrator August 27, 2023
SACRAMENTO, CA – The California Legislative Women’s Caucus here hosted a briefing last week focused “on sexual harm perpetuated by Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) staff,” sponsored by survivors and advocates from California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), Survived & Punished, UnCommon Law, Prison Law Office, and Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition (SWFC).
The groups coordinated the testimony at the hearing, and said in a statement they have formed Solidarity Committee for Incarcerated Survivors (SCIS) to investigate the “horrific environment of fear and coercion that breeds abuse and assault in prisons…while working to secure protections and resources for currently and formerly incarcerated survivors.”
The hearing, according to SCIS, follows charges recently brought against former corrections officer Gregory Rodriguez, who the coalition charges “has been connected to the abuse of more than one percent of all the incarcerated people at CCWF.”
The coalition said its goal is to “shed light on the systemic and unchecked nature of such pervasive abuse,” and encourage California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to implement policy changes “crucial for investigating abuse and protecting survivors.”
“We must address the abusive and retaliatory culture inherent to the prison system that allows someone – and anyone – like Rodriguez to use their position of power to coerce, intimidate, and abuse vulnerable incarcerated people,” said Amika Mota, Executive Director of Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition.
Mota added, “The entire system must be overhauled to prioritize the safety of victims and witnesses and create survivor-led programs to support recovery.”
Advocates claim incarcerated survivors and witnesses of sexual assault by prison staff experience retaliation when they speak up, and “many are silenced through threats to remove ‘privileges,’ such as visitation or phone calls, physical violence, and intense surveillance.”
They also cited “the CDCR protocol for investigating sexual abuse, which mandates strip-searching the victim and isolating them in solitary confinement.”
“This response, and the lack of safe reporting, effectively institutionalizes sexual violence and compounds the traumatic violence that survivors have experienced,” argues Katie Dixon, Campaign and Policy Organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
In a 2017 pleading, the #MeTooBehindBars lawsuit, advocates said they tried to “hold CDCR accountable for violent assaults by CCWF correctional officers who used abusive physical force and verbal assaults, including homophobic and transphobic threats against queer and gender non-conforming people.”
The SCIS maintains there is still no meaningful change, and are asking for “investigations into abuse at the hands of staff conducted by an independent group, removal of personnel accused of abuse from the prisons they work in during investigations, expedited release of survivors and access for survivors to comprehensive and self-determined healthcare and victim services that are also independent of CDCR, including access to lines of communication that are not surveilled.”
“I want to forget, but my body betrays me as a vehicle carrying these memories. I want to forget the time I was taking a shower in county jail only to turn and find an officer watching me. I want to forget being sexually assaulted by that same officer while I was handcuffed in shackles being escorted to the yard,” said Latasha Brown in the testimony.
Brown added, “I want to forget having a flashlight shone on me until I flashed my genitals. I want to forget what his hands feel like as they grope me. But my body betrays me as a vehicle carrying these memories. I want to forget the things that have happened to me at CCWF by multiple officers, including one whose name everybody in this room knows. Since I am completely at the mercy of my captors, I have a feeling of perpetual uneasiness as I know the lengths they will go to cover up their misconduct.”
By the time her husband brought her to the United States, Marisela Andrade had already borne the brunt of his anger repeatedly. The recently married 18-year-old knew that the move would not stop his violence, but she never imagined that her new life would include being trafficked, arrested and sentenced to life without parole.
Now age 44, Andrade has survived and overcome all of these horrors. In 2018, California’s then-Gov. Jerry Brown commuted her sentence to 15 years to life, enabling her to apply for parole. She did so in 2021 and was granted parole.
But instead of walking out of prison, she was met by immigration officers who handcuffed her and drove her to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) holding facility in Fresno. Later, she was transferred to an ICE prison in Aurora, Colorado, far from her family and the support network she’d built during her 15 years in prison.
Now, she faces deportation to a country she has not lived in since the first month of her marriage.
“I Don’t Have Good Memories”
Andrade was 15 years old when she met the man who would become her husband — and trafficker. They married three years later. On their wedding night, her husband beat his 18-year-old bride. It wouldn’t be the last time he hit her.
The next month, the couple moved from Mexico to California. Andrade doesn’t know why they moved. “He never said anything to me,” she told Truthout. “There was no explanation of why we were doing this.”
By then, Andrade had learned to do everything that her husband said or risk a beating. That didn’t change when they arrived at her husband’s brother’s house. She stayed in the room that the couple shared, coming out only to cook meals for the family.
“I was scared of him,” she explained. “I always did whatever he wants. I didn’t come out without his permission [or] he would beat me up.”
The abuse continued after she became pregnant. During her first pregnancy, her husband beat her so hard that she miscarried. After that, the couple had three daughters. They became another means of abuse — her husband threatened to take the children if she ever attempted to report his violence. Terrified, she remained quiet.
Then, he began forcing her to have sex with other men. The first time was with one his friends. She cried and asked the man why he was forcing himself on her. “I already paid for you,” he responded.
Over the next several years, her husband forced her to have sex with several other men. “I don’t understand why my husband did that to me,” she said. “Because when somebody loves you or you marry somebody, they shouldn’t do what my husband was doing to me. They shouldn’t hit me.” But she was unsure what she could do. “I’m coming from a little town in Mexico and here was a different world,” she recalled.
She also feared for her daughters. She tried to keep them with her, but that did not protect them from her husband’s wrath. Once, he beat their 4-year-old for taking items off the door.
Within a year, Andrade had had enough. “I felt, at that time, it was him or me,” she said. “I was so tired of the domestic violence. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to my daughters.” By then, her daughters were a year-and-a-half, 5 and nearly 11. She feared that the sexual abuse would extend to them.
She broke the silence, confiding in her sister-in-law. That sister-in-law introduced Marisela to the man who would become her co-defendant in her husband’s death. Andrade recalled that she told him what had been happening and recruited him to beat her husband. “I wanted him to feel the way I feel,” she said. The two made plans by text and, on the agreed-upon night, Andrade placed sleeping pills in her husband’s coffee and left the door unlocked. Her co-defendant kidnapped and killed him. His body was later found in the trunk of the man’s car.
Andrade was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping. At the time, Andrade believed she was only guilty of kidnapping because she had enlisted someone to beat her husband, but firmly believed that she was innocent of murder. She went to trial — and lost. She was sentenced to life without parole.
“It was hard to understand the life sentence,” she recalled. But she remembered vowing, “One day, I will come out.”
One Step Closer to Freedom?
When Andrade arrived at Valley State Prison for Women, she spoke no English. She had heard that prisons were full of drugs and sexual assaults and, terrified, barely left her cell. Many imprisoned at Valley State spoke no Spanish, leaving Andrade isolated with her fears.
Her brother took custody of her daughters. He kept her updated on their lives. Andrade wrote letters regularly, though the girls never responded.
Slowly, with the help of the women around her (and cartoons), she began to learn English. She enrolled in the prison’s self-help groups, including those that focused on domestic violence and abuse dynamics. She vowed never to get into trouble again. And she kept that promise. During this time, she never incurred a rule violation, disciplinary infraction or even an administrative infraction, or an action as inconsequential as having too many pieces of property, being late or absent from work or a program, using vulgar language, or failure to comply with prison grooming standards.
Still, her chances of freedom seemed remote. One day, she overheard a conversation in the prison yard and the word “commutation.” She stopped and asked the woman about that word.
She … was granted parole. But instead of walking out of prison, she was met by immigration officers who handcuffed her.
Commutation is a form of clemency which shortens a person’s prison sentence. For Californians serving life without parole, it is their only chance at leaving prison alive if they have exhausted their legal appeals.
The woman told her what forms to request from the prison library. Then, she helped Andrade fill them out and send them.
Many people applying for commutations wait years for a response. But by the next year, Andrade was called for an interview. She described her marriage, the abuse and her responsibility for setting in motion her husband’s death.
In 2018, citing her history of significant abuse, efforts to transform her life and lack of prison disciplinary history, Governor Brown commuted her sentence to 15 years to life. It made her eligible to appear before a parole hearing, but she still had to convince the board to let her go.
Three years later, she appeared at her first hearing. She was one of 62 people in California women’s prisons granted parole that year. She was elated, though it would not be the end of her time behind bars.
The Dual System of Justice
Andrade had not realized that her conviction could lead to deportation. Though a parole commissioner mentioned an ICE detainer at her hearing, Andrade did not understand. She began making plans for her release and envisioning a life without fear and violence.
One week before her release, prison officials told Andrade that she would not walk out of prison a free woman. Instead, they kept her for five additional days until immigration officers could take her to immigrant detention to await deportation hearings. It’s an occurrence so common that advocates call it the prison-to-deportation pipeline.
Andrade was frightened about returning to Mexico, where her life would be in danger. Fortunately, another incarcerated woman had connected her with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, an advocacy group for incarcerated women and trans people in California. The coalition had been reaching out to people serving life without parole in the state’s women’s prisons. The coalition was part of ICE Out of California, a coalition of 100 community and statewide coalitions working to end state agencies’ cooperation with ICE.
When they learned about the ICE detainer, the group began a campaign urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant her a pardon, which would remove the threat of deportation.
Two days before her December release date, ICE decided to hold Andrade without bond. The agency charged her as removable because of her conviction, which ICE classified as an aggravated felony that rendered her deportable. On her release date, immigration officials took her from the prison to a private immigration prison in Aurora, Colorado.
She’s not alone. According to ICE Out of California, California state prisons transferred 3,200 people to ICE custody between 2019 and 2020.
In September 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum with guidelines for detention and deportation. Those guidelines prioritized noncitizens who were classified as threats to national security, border security and public safety. But the memo also listed several mitigating factors that favored not pursuing detention and deportation, including a person’s status as the victim of a crime and whether that person was eligible for humanitarian or other immigration relief. (In June 2022, a federal court in Texas vacated that memo, but it had been in effect when ICE made its decision to detain and begin deportation proceedings against Andrade.)
Two days before her December release date, ICE decided to hold Andrade without bond.
In 2022, California senators failed to pass a bill that might have helped thousands of future Mariselas. The VISION Act would have blocked state prisons and jails from transferring noncitizens to ICE custody once they completed their sentences. It passed the State Assembly, but fell three votes short of passing in the State Senate. But even if the legislature had approved it, Governor Newsom had already vetoed similar legislation in 2019, stating that it could “negatively impact prison operations.”
This year, advocates are at the legislature with a modified bill — the HOME (Harmonizing Our Measures for Equality) Act, which blocks transfers of noncitizen incarcerated people who have been released through recently enacted criminal justice reforms, such as youth parole, elder parole, or a bill allowing resentencing for domestic violence survivors. It would also protect immigrants and refugees who have been granted clemency, such as Andrade. The act only applies to cooperation between state prisons and ICE. It does not extend to local jails, which between 2018 and 2019 transferred 3,700 people into ICE custody.
The act’s author, Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, stated at a press conference, “The state of California has created a dual system of justice, which treats immigrants differently after they have paid their debt to society and have been paroled. They are not given the opportunity to restart their lives and go home,” she said. “It is a complete injustice in our judicial system.”
Pam Fadem, who works with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners on immigrant defense and the campaign to free Andrade, agrees. Both the VISION and HOME Acts would apply to noncitizens who have already finished their prison sentences or been approved for release by the governor’s appointed parole board. “If you’re being paroled, you’ve been deemed rehabilitated and no longer a threat to the community,” she stated.
Furthermore, Fadem reminded Truthout, California is a sanctuary state: “We should be providing sanctuary to people.” Many of the people with whom the ICE out of California coalition work came to the United States as children. Although she had been married one month earlier, Andrade, at age 18, was little more than a child when she arrived in the U.S. “This is their home, not someplace that was their ancestral home,” Fadem said.
While neither bill protects against deportation, Fadem notes that being allowed to return home can mean the difference between staying and deportation. “If people have the chance to go home, they can establish their roots in the community, in their faith communities, in their families and in working. Then they have a stronger argument against deportation,” she pointed out. “When you hand somebody directly over to ICE directly from prison, what can you say when you get to immigration court [and the judge asks] ‘What have you been doing for the past 10, 15, 20 years while you’ve been in prison?’” But those who have been allowed to rebuild their lives can show their ties to the community and have a stronger argument against uprooting them from these ties.
Andrade agrees. Had she been released into the community instead of transferred to ICE detention, she would have already been able to start working and established herself in the community. She would be much further along in reconnecting with her daughters.
Free But Still Under Threat of Deportation
Andrade spent the next 14 months in an immigrant prison in Colorado, far from her support network, without a bond hearing.
There, she filed an application requesting protection under the Convention Against Torture. It was initially denied but, upon appeal, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that the judge had not considered all relevant evidence. That application is still pending.
In December 2022, with the help of advocates, Andrade also filed an application for a pardon.
A pardon is another form of clemency that the governor can issue. For noncitizens, a pardon removes the threat of deportation. It also restores a person’s civil rights, making them eligible for jobs that otherwise bar those with felony convictions.
Although Andrade had been moved thousands of miles from friends, family and advocates, they did not stop fighting for her. After she filed her pardon application, they organized monthly email and telephone blasts to Governor Newsom, urging him to pardon Andrade. They connected her with an immigration attorney who is helping her apply for asylum under the Convention Against Torture.
“Ms. Andrade’s home is here in the United States,” Marisela’s attorney Julia Rabinovich told Truthout. “She left Mexico as a teenager, and now faces credible threats on her life should she be deported to Mexico.”
In March, a federal judge ruled that Andrade’s 14-month detention without a bond hearing violated her constitutional right to due process. On March 29, she was released on bond. She was allowed to return to California, where she now is not only rebuilding her life, but learning what it feels like to make her own choices, including what to wear and what to eat. She has learned that she loves Chinese and Japanese foods, which her husband, who continually kept her on a diet to keep her from gaining weight, never allowed her to try.
If allowed to remain in the United States, Andrade plans to go back to school. While in prison, she worked with people with disabilities. Now, she hopes to work with aging people.
“In the United States, Ms. Andrade can not only continue to heal from the abuse she suffered, but can also serve as a leader and mentor for others,” Rabinovich said. “Ms. Andrade believes no one deserves to suffer in silence, and if she is able to stay here in the United States, she plans to share her story and offer resources and hope to other survivors of abuse, so that their lives can have a different trajectory than her own.”
And, though her future remains uncertain, Andrade wants to help others the way that the California Coalition for Women Prisoners helped her. If she could speak directly to Governor Newsom, she would ask, “Give me an opportunity. I can demonstrate that I’m not a danger to society. I want to help with my testimony to help others, so they don’t make these same mistakes that I do in life.”
At around five in the morning on Aug. 31, 2020, Patricia Medina heard a knock on the wall of her prison dorm in Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA. She hadn’t slept at all that night. The correctional officer called her name.
“Your pass is here, it’s time to go,” Medina remembers them telling her.
It was her parole date. In a moment when she should have been filled with excitement to leave after 17 years, Medina was instead consumed by dread and uncertainty — she had no idea what would happen next because she was facing a detainer from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She hadn’t heard anything about her impending deportation to her native country, Belize, since ICE agents interviewed her three months after she arrived in prison— almost two decades ago. Her green card had expired and she now faced the threat of deportation after prison.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Medina said in a recent interview. “I was just hoping and praying that they wouldn’t show up, that maybe my paperwork would get lost somewhere. You wish for all these things because you don’t want to believe that it’s going to happen.”
She had 30 minutes to say goodbye to her dorm mates, many of whom she had befriended, gather her belongings and head to the release building.
As she walked out of her dorm, she felt her heart pounding and wondered if there would be an agent waiting for her. Medina, 54 at the time, hadn’t been to Belize since she was 12 years old, when her parents brought her to the U.S. She had no ties there. Her two sons, parents and siblings were in California, and she would also have to give up a construction job she already had lined up following her release if she were deported.
As she got closer to the building, she saw an ICE van.
“My heart just dropped,” Medina said, “My stomach was in knots. It’s kind of like when reality kind of sunk in.”
When she entered the release building, she was handcuffed and shackled, then escorted to the van, where they informed her that she would be flown to an immigration detention center in Aurora, CO, where she would appear in immigration court before being sent to Belize.
Now 58 years old, she lives alone in a country she had not been to since she was a child. Medina worries she might never see her parents, sisters and children again, as her parents and sister suffer from health issues that prevent them from traveling.
“I might not get to see them again in this lifetime and it breaks my heart,” Medina said. “It’s rough emotionally, financially, physically, mentally…This is existing, I have no purpose here. I was hoping for an opportunity to remain in the states so I can reconnect with my children and make amends in person.”
“I’m just hoping something really changes for all these people that are going through what I went through,” Medina added. “Think about the families these people are leaving behind.”
For decades, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has been transferring individuals to ICE before their parole date after applying a “potential immigration hold” status it created to individuals the department believes to be “foreign-born.” Medina is one of 7,824 people just over the last five years that CDCR transferred to immigration detention to be deported.
While many countries of birth are reported during the prison intake process, legal experts and advocates for the rights of incarcerated people have said that CDCR immigration hold policies can also be discriminatory, unlawful and based on racist assumptions. Public records obtained by ScheerPost show that it predominantly impacts Latinos and Asians.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) have filed a lawsuit against the CDCR and CDCR Secretary Jeff Macomber for such practices that have impacted thousands. The 7,824 people transferred from 2018-2022 included at least 250 U.S. born citizens and an additional 600 cases reported as coming from “unknown” countries of birth. CDCR did not respond to repeated questions about what “unknown” meant and what was done to these people.
“If CDCR is unable to ascertain the individual’s place of birth from the
information received or the information indicates the individual may be a foreign national, CDCR inquires with ICE for an official determination,” CDCR Press Secretary Terri Hardy wrote in a statement to ScheerPost.
CDCR did not answer questions regarding why the potential hold system was created, why people facing these holds are blocked from accessing some prison programming and housing available to incarcerated U.S. citizens, and why some U.S. citizens are also targeted by their immigration policies. ICE media representatives declined to comment on this story citing a pending lawsuit.
The names of thousands of people in CDCR custody with a potential hold are sent to ICE to verify their immigration status. According to a CDCR representative, there are currently 6,058 people in state prisons with a CDCR “potential hold” and 7,037 more facing ICE detainment as of July 2023, which means their hold was verified and processed by ICE.
A CDCR representative told ScheerPost that “the Department contacts ICE prior to the individual’s release date to arrange a pick-up to occur within five calendar days before the scheduled release date” and that if ICE does not pick up the individual by their release day, the individual will be released “under parole or probation supervision.”
CDCR internal memos obtained by the ACLU show that the “potential hold” policy goes back to 2005, but CDCR had a similar policy in 1992 that also involved cooperation with immigration authorities, said ACLU attorney Sana Singh. In 1977, the federal government created the International Prisoner Transfer Program that permits the transfer of incarcerated people back to their country of birth during their sentence, which applies at the state and federal level if approved by the BPH. The CDCR Employee Operations Manual states that CDCR “Coordinates with the BPH to facilitate return of inmates to their country of citizenship” in compliance with this program.
Correspondence between CDCR staff and ICE agents obtained through the California Public Records Act by the ACLU shows that CDCR proactively sends ICE lists of people they believe to be “foreign born” — determined by skin color, race, ethnic group identification, ancestry— even if their reported country of birth is the U.S.
Last October, Roth Chan submitted a request to join a program at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA to prepare her for release from prison. Trying to make positive changes in her life, Chan, 37, had been spending her remaining year of incarceration studying for her high school diploma equivalent—the GED—volunteering in classes, attending church services and bonding with women in her support groups.
When Chan checked on her application for the reentry program, her prison counselor said it was denied because she was facing a “potential immigration hold, even though she is a U.S. citizen born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley in California. Although her parents emigrated from Cambodia, CDCR internal records identified her as Mexican.
“It made me feel hopeless,” Chan recalled.
She said in a phone interview that when she explained her legal citizenship to her counselor in October 2022, she was told that CDCR could not remove the hold and she would have to wait for ICE to interview her within 31 days. She said she never got that call. Chan said in January 2023, she filed a request to eliminate the potential hold but was “denied” the next day because ICE had not yet responded to CDCR’s request for a “potential detainer investigation.”
In late May 2023, Chan’s “potential immigration hold” was removed by CDCR without explanation. Chan said that she was never given any justification for why she was facing an immigration hold as a U.S. citizen.
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In 2018, the California Values Act prohibited local law enforcement from assisting and complying with immigration enforcement, and mandated that the CDCR could not let immigration agents interview an incarcerated person without the person’s written consent. Nor can CDCR limit access to rehabilitative and educational programming, or consider immigration status when determining prison classification (although the CDCR manual still states that “inmate workers … will not be eligible to receive external accredited certificates” that every other inmate worker receives).
The California Constitution also prohibits law enforcement from treating people differently on the basis of assumed national origin and ethnicity. California is home to the largest immigrant population in the U.S., with 10.5 million immigrants, 5.8 million being naturalized citizens and more than 2 million individuals having lawful immigration status in the state, leaving 2.7 million undocumented and eligible for deportation.
There have been three recent attempts by the state legislature to prohibit CDCR’s cooperation with ICE, and the most recent bill — the HOME Act — is making its way through the Assembly this summer. California is following the path of Illinois, Oregon and Washington D.C., which have created legislation that blocks state prisons from cooperating with immigration officials.
Resolving an immigration hold from prison can be difficult, current and former incarcerated individuals said in interviews. ICE often takes months or years to verify citizenship, in many cases not until parole dates are near, according to the ACLU lawsuit.
The 7,824 individuals impacted by these transfers to ICE detention in lieu of parole from 2018-2022 are from more than half of the countries in the world. This includes the transfers of 5,040 people reported to be born in Mexico, 499 from El Salvador, 346 from Guatemala and 138 from Vietnam. CDCR did not provide information about how many people were deported from these transfers.
Nataly Marinero, a domestic violence survivor and transgender man who has spent 15 years in the California Institution for Women in Corona, CA worrying that he would be sent back to El Salvador, which he fled at age 17 after experiencing the trauma of sexual assaults and ongoing violence due to his sexual orientation and identity.
“I suffered a lot in my country,” Marinero recalls.
When he came to the U.S., Marinero said he felt free and less depressed than in El Salvador. He could live as an open transgender man. He feared that he would be sent to jail or be killed if he was returned to his native country.
“I don’t want to feel like I had to hide my sexuality,” Marinero said. “It’s very traumatic.”
Marinero, 37, has been in CDCR’s custody since 2008 and is nearing his release date. In his time in CDCR, Marinero read many books, worked in the kitchen, went to school for his GED and did other rehabilitative programming in the evenings.
In March, Marinero had a parole hearing where he was found eligible for release by the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH). According to transcript documents obtained by ScheerPost, the BPH said that Marinero “is not the same person that came to prison … [he] has made improvements on [himself] to the point that [he’s] not an unreasonable risk to public safety,” but moments later remarked that “[he’s] very likely to be deported.” Marinero was supported by the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, which urged Gov. Newsom to stop his transfer to ICE, stating in a petition: “Despite BPH recognizing Nataly’s transformation and rehabilitation, [CDCR] plans to turn Nataly over to ICE for deportation to a country that is known to actively target transgender people.”
Marinero’s case was referred to an en banc BPH hearing, where supporters were able to speak on Marinero’s behalf and urge the board to intervene in his ICE transfer.
On Aug. 23, the BPH found Marinero was suitable to return to his California home. After years of grassroots organizing in a campaign with the CCWP, Marinero will be released to the community, where he looks forward to connecting with his supporters.
He said this has been “a stressful situation. The unknown [was] driving me crazy.”
“After 17 and a half years of being locked down, I’m finally going to get to see my friends,” Marinero said, speaking of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners. “I’m so happy.”
The ACLU and ALC in their lawsuit are seeking a court order requiring CDCR to comply with the California Constitution and California Values Act, which prohibit the use of state resources to assist immigration enforcement. Filed in April, the lawsuit “vindicates the fundamental rights guaranteed to every person in California to be free from unlawful discrimination” and said CDCR’s immigration policies are unlawful based on discriminatory classifications that violate California law.
“If not for the fact that they’re immigrants or that CDCR has perceived them to be immigrants, they would just be allowed to go home to their families and communities, or have access to programs, services, and activities, just like any other person in custody,” said Sana Singh, an attorney with the ACLU representing the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Roth Chan, the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, Root & Rebound and Anouthinh “Choy” Pangthong, said, “This creates a dual system of punishment that discriminates against our immigrant communities.”
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For nearly 19 years in prison, Pangthong faced the threat of deportation. He has memories of an imaginative childhood playing outdoors and roaming around Stockton amid his family’s travels for migrant farming work up and down California. At the age of 17, he remembers calling his mother from a youth detention center one day and learning that she had become a naturalized citizen, and because of this, he, too, became a citizen.
“She’s been working all these years for that moment, and so when she became a citizen, she was like, ‘Son, we made it,’” Pangthong recalled.
But two months later when Pangthong turned 18 and was transferred to San Quentin State Prison, he was interviewed by two immigration agents who asked him questions about where he was born and how he got to the U.S. Pangthong answered their questions.
“I told them that I am a citizen and they just disregarded that,” Pangthong said.
Pangthong remembers thinking it unbelievable that ICE was trying to determine his status in the U.S. when he was already a citizen. Within a month, he was called to his counselor’s office where he was given a form that stated that he was facing an immigration hold.
In the time that followed, Pangthong informed his counselor, the associate warden and other high-ranking officials at his annual classification meetings that he is a citizen and asked to have his hold removed, but they said there was nothing they could do to help him. According to Pangthong, they told him to contact ICE but did not give him any directions on how to do so. He remembers feeling helpless that his assertions of his citizenship were being ignored, even though he had proof.
“It was frustrating, I don’t even know what the steps were,” Pangthong said. “That added to a different type of heaviness that I already felt just being in prison.”
After more than a decade passed, Pangthong said he felt even more stressed because he started to worry about going before a parole board with an immigration hold on his record. At one point he said he hoped to stay in prison just to avoid being deported.
“Throughout my sentence, it was always in the back of my mind, like, ‘What if they deport me and I’m a citizen,’ having to worry about when I am released, being scooped up by ICE,” Pangthong said.
Pangthong said immigration holds were not uncommon in prison. He said there were times his friends would get released, but later he would learn they were actually picked up by immigration authorities.
“It wasn’t a rare thing … those bittersweet moments where somebody I know gets to be free from prison, but only to go to another prison,” Pangthong said.
In 2017, three years before he would be released, Pangthong met a visiting immigration attorney at a program called ROOTS, or “Restoring Our Original True Selves” — who, coincidentally, had been helping his friend remove a potential hold. Pangthong wrote to the attorney who agreed to work with him pro bono about his case.
The process of corresponding with the attorney and gathering paperwork to send an affidavit proving Pangthong’s citizenship to the Department of Homeland Security took several months. Pangthong said it also involved having retraumatizing conversations with his family — worrying if he would get sent to Thailand, where they had fled a war — and they wondered if they would also be impacted by immigration enforcement. A month after the letter was sent, he received a letter from the DHS confirming that he was a citizen and saying that his hold would be removed immediately.
“For 19 years, I just had this detainer on me for no reason,” Pangthong said.
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Pangthong and Chan are plaintiffs in the lawsuit against CDCR and Macomber to end the policy that currently has six percent of the CDCR population in a “potential hold” status.
“CDCR’s potential hold and ICE notification policies risk wrongfully transferring U.S. citizens, like Pangthong and Chan, and lawful permanent residents to ICE custody,” the ACLU/ALC lawsuit stated.
According to the lawsuit, CDCR placed and continues to impose a potential hold on Maria Hernandez, a U.S.-born citizen, but that also is being ignored by CDCR officials. It states, “CDCR assumed that Ms. Hernandez was not born in the United States and placed a potential hold on the basis of actual or perceived race, ethnicity, ethnic group identification, color, ancestry, national origin, or indicia of national origin.”
The lawsuit also mentions Brian Buckle, a naturalized citizen who was facing an immigration hold in CDCR custody despite insistence that he is a U.S. citizen and CDCR’s own records indicating the same. The lawsuit says that in June 2020, instead of being released from prison and spending Father’s Day with his family, Buckle was transferred and detained in immigration detention for 36 days. There, he was also repeatedly ignored when he presented evidence of his citizenship and was urged to sign deportation paperwork until an immigration lawyer got involved and ICE verified his citizenship.
It mentions another naturalized citizen who has and continues to face a potential hold in CDCR custody since 2017, and three other people who were facing potential holds and were repeatedly ignored when they told CDCR staff that they were citizens — these holds weren’t removed until after ICE had instructed CDCR to do so, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also mentions instances where, according to CDCR’s own records, they classified some people as Hispanic who were of other ethnicities, including Chan, who is Cambodian but was classified as Mexican.
This policy is illegal, Singh states: “With this unlawful targeting of immigrants and refugees, the California prison system is also failing at its alleged mission to provide people with the tools to return to their communities, to have access to rehabilitative and educational programs.”
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, transfers from California’s prisons and jails accounted for most of ICE’s bookings into detention centers — so much so that they began transferring incarcerated people to immigration centers in Colorado. California detention centers had reached capacity, causing the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Southern California Chapter to intervene by sending a petition to the California Supreme Court to “halt all local law enforcement transfers to ICE during California’s state of emergency due to COVID-19.”
“For over a decade, we’ve been working on trying to break the links between state and local law enforcement and ICE,” said Carl Takei, Criminal Justice Reform Program Manager at the Asian Law Caucus.
Since the California Values Act went into effect in 2018, there have been further legislative efforts to place restrictions on CDCR’s immigration policies, such as the VISION Act in 2020 that would have restricted CDCR’s cooperation with ICE, but last year it fell three votes short In the state Senate. In 2019, Gov. Newsom vetoed a similar bill on the basis that it would “negatively impact prison operations.”
The bills faced opposition from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents CDCR correctional officers, and from the California Police Chiefs Association, calling it “a major threat to public safety.” Takei said that there was also a lot of overemphasizing immigrants and crime. A recent study by the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance found that there is no correlation between immigrants and high crime rates, and that citizens are more likely to commit a crime than an immigrant.
“Scaremongering has too often drowned out the discussion that we need to have about what kind of system we want to have, whether that system was fair and equitable for immigrants and how this impacts immigrants and their families throughout the state when CDCR and other law enforcement agencies engage in discrimination like this,” Takei said.
“At the end of their time in custody, immigrants who have benefited from criminal justice reforms … never get the same opportunity to reunite with family and experience the benefits of that parole,” Takei said. “CDCR contacts ICE and ensures that rather than being able to leave the prison gates, immigrants who are granted parole get shackled and placed into an ICE van and taken to an ICE detention facility directly from the prison.”
In April 2023, Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo introduced the HOME Act, a bill that would “prohibit the CDCR from detaining people on the basis of a hold request, providing an immigration authority with release date information, or responding to a notification request, transferring to an immigration authority, or facilitating or assisting with transfer requests.”On Aug. 14, the bill passed the Senate’s Appropriations Committee and is now going through the Senate and Assembly, and if passed, will go to Gov. Newsom’s desk.
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Since his release in 2020, Pangthong has been advocating for immigrant and formerly incarcerated communities by participating in community events and hosting a podcast focused on storytelling and changing the narrative around these topics.
In early July, Pangthong attended a convening in Stockton of community members and advocacy organizations rallying in front of an ICE check-in center in support of a resident. There, he noticed the terrified looks on the community member’s family not knowing what was going to happen, and the many other families there as well.
“When the judge sends us to however many years, that is how many years we’re supposed to serve,” Pangthong said. “Deporting individuals, ripping folks apart from their family — that’s another form of punishment and that does nothing for public safety.”
Pangthong said that he hopes that the HOME Act is passed to keep families together and end the double punishment faced by immigrants caught up in California’s criminal justice system, and so that community members can feel safe from the harm of deportation.
“The ‘R’ in CDCR is supposed to be for rehabilitation,” Pangthong said. “If these practices aren’t stopped, then it just creates more harm. …What I really want out of [this lawsuit] is for CDCR to stop its practices and its policy against foreign born nationals.”
Victoria Valenzuela
Victoria Valenzuela is an investigative reporter based in California covering issues in criminal justice. She currently oversees the criminal justice coverage as a reporter at ScheerPost. She is also a fellow with the Law and Justice Journalism Project. In the past, Valenzuela has also worked with ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She is completing graduate studies at the University of Southern California, where she also helps teach a class on the power and responsibility of the press.