The Marshall Project

Prison-to-ICE Pipeline Persists, Even in Sanctuary States

This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters. Ursula Gomez paid her dues to the state of California, spending over two decades in prison, where she immersed herself in rehabilitation programs and went to college. Her sentence came to an end in July 2024. But instead of letting her go home, the prison system turned her over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For 11 months, Gomez was transferred to multiple detention centers, where she said her mental health deteriorated. By then, President Donald Trump was in office and deporting people to countries they hadn’t come from like El Salvador and South Sudan. With that threat hanging over her head, she agreed to be removed to Mexico, the country she and her family left when she was 5. Gomez was deported later that year. “I have no ties to Mexico,” she said over a video call in March. “It’s extremely difficult because I’m alone.” Gomez became trapped in what’s known as the prison-to-ICE pipeline, a practice critics call “double punishment.” When ICE identifies a person in a prison system or