Hyrum Gonzalez stayed home from school Monday in solidarity with the nationwide “Day Without Immigrants” protest. Free from class, the 17-year-old instead chose to spend his time in a Utah House committee room and testify against Herriman Republican Rep. Candice Pierucci’s bill that would make it easier for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport some undocumented immigrants and permanent residents in Utah.
“I wasn’t really doing anything at home, and I was just trying to figure out what I could do within my little community,” Gonzalez said in an interview Wednesday. The Skyline student works with a non-profit organization called Title I Strings, a group that aims to provide musical education to low-income kids, some of whom have undocumented parents. When he saw that Pierucci’s bill would be considered, Gonzalez wanted to go to the Capitol and speak out.
“A lot of these kids tell me about their situation, or at least it’s an open secret for a lot of them,” he said. “These children are not necessarily responsible for the actions that their parents will make — and even if the parent were to make a simple violation like a class A misdemeanor, it shouldn’t destroy their lives, and families shouldn’t be separated.”
The bill, HB0226, would change Utah law to allow the state to hold people who have been convicted of certain misdemeanors an additional 24 hours, bumping up the maximum sentence for a class A misdemeanor — which includes low-level crimes like marijuana possession or theft — to 365 days from the current 364, which in turn triggers federal deportation proceedings. The bill would also allow for certain state officials to dissolve nonprofit organizations that “knowingly” transport undocumented individuals.
The legislation comes after Republican Gov. Spencer Cox announced in November that the state would work to support President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies, saying that Utah would have “zero tolerance” for “those who demonstrate a threat to public safety while in the country illegally.”
In presenting her bill, Pierucci made clear that the goal is specifically to assist ICE.
“It’s become very clear in these work group meetings, in discussions with ICE, their policy is that to deport someone on a class A misdemeanor, they need to have served 365 days,” she told her colleagues. “We are limiting that partnership with them with just having a 364, so it’s just extending it another 24 hours.”
But this is hardly a small change, opponents of the bill say.
“One of the distinguishing factors in immigration is that there’s a distinction between a crime involving moral turpitude and an aggravated felony,” criminal defense and immigration attorney Adam Crayk said in an interview. “One of those distinctions is that misdemeanors can be considered aggravated felonies if the sentence imposed is a year or more.”
Rep. Andrew Stoddard, D-Midvale, was the sole dissenting vote against the bill on the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee. “You look at a bill like this, and on its face, it’s just one more day in jail,” Stoddard, an attorney by trade, told reporters Wednesday. “But what it does is it affects a whole group of people in a different way. You know, the white male citizen, it’s going to be an extra day in jail. The noncitizen is going to be deported — and that is highly unfair.”
This issue could be compounded by a Senate bill that aims to enhance criminal penalties for undocumented individuals, like bumping a class B misdemeanor, for example, to a class A. If both bills were to become law, this could mean that even lower-level misdemeanors could trigger deportation proceedings.
“Honestly, you look at the level of class B misdemeanor, and it’s like probably 90% of people can commit one any day and not necessarily even know. If you get multiple speeding tickets in school zones, it’s bumped up,” Stoddard said. “All of a sudden, you’re going to jail for a year and you get deported. Like, that’s absurd.”
Responding to opponents, like Gonzalez and a representative of the Utah Defense Attorney Association who testified against the bill at Monday’s committee meeting, the bill’s sponsor argued that those impacted by the bill are, in her eyes, already criminals.
“If someone comes into our country illegally, they already broke the law,” Pierucci said. “So this is a second strike, in my opinion.”
But immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal, Crayk said.
“Their whole distinction is incorrect,” he explained, adding the bill would apply to those with permanent residency. “It’s wholly on board to comply with Trump’s mass deportation plan,” he said. “The legislators are diving right in to be complicit in this complete disaster of a mass deportation plan.”
The House bill, should it become law, would undo legislation passed by Utah lawmakers only five years ago that limited the sentence for a class A misdemeanor to under a year specifically to avoid triggering the federal deportation code.
“If you’re one of those individuals that got a class A [misdemeanor] and are nonviolent, just because of that one definition in the federal law, you’re swept up in a very big net,” former Rep. Eric Hutchings, R-Kearns said in 2019. “Too often, we just scoop up everything. We know for a fact we can do a better job.”
Not long after, Hutchings’ bill was passed by the House and Senate without a single dissenting vote.
This story is developing and may be updated.
