San Joaquin County Sheriff Patrick Withrow disputed a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claim that his office refused to honor an immigration hold request for a man now charged with a triple homicide in Stanislaus County.
DHS said Monday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lodged a detainer after Joaquin Escoto Vazquez, a Mexican national, was arrested on a DUI charge in June 2025, but California “sanctuary politicians” released him from the San Joaquin County Jail without notifying federal authorities.
In a video posted on social media Wednesday, Withrow said the sheriff’s office received ICE’s request hours after Vazquez had already been released from jail.
“They put in there that we refused to honor a hold last year on a guy who was booked for DUI,” Withrow said of the DHS statement. “That’s incorrect information. I wish they’d reached out to us before they said something like that and put it out. I wish they had contacted us, and we would have told them that the gentleman was booked for DUI at 1 a.m. He got released at 6 a.m., and then at 9 a.m., we received a fax.”
Withrow said the ICE communication was not a detainer that required the county to hold Vazquez, but a request for advance notice before his release.
“We did not do anything wrong here at the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office,” Withrow said. “Their hold came after he was already gone. It wasn’t even a hold.”
The Modesto Police Department arrested Vazquez, 28, on May 28 in connection with the deaths of 23-year-old Fabiola Gonzalez-Nunez, her infant son, Mateo Gonzalez, and 54-year-old Maria Sylvia Nunez-Villalobos, the infant’s grandmother, in Modesto. DHS said Vazquez was in a relationship with Gonzalez-Nunez and faces felony charges of homicide and child cruelty.
DHS acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis said the killings “could have been prevented” if California officials had cooperated with ICE. The agency said Vazquez had previously been arrested four times on suspicion of driving under the influence and had been deported before reentering the United States illegally.
“Governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow sanctuary politicians must stop putting lives at risk by releasing criminals from jails into California communities to create more victims,” Bis said.
During a presentation to the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Withrow said ICE requested 859 detainers in San Joaquin County in 2025, and the county honored 77 of them, about 9%, in accordance with California’s Truth Act and Trust Act, which limit when local law enforcement agencies can cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
“Why did we only honor 77 of them? Because we follow the law in California,” Withrow said. “The Truth and Trust Act says there are only certain crimes that we can honor these detainers on. Our hands are kind of tied, and this is a horrible act. This guy shouldn’t have been in our country and did that, but we didn’t do anything wrong.”
Withrow added, “We work with ICE very well here in San Joaquin County.”
Record reporter Hannah Workman covers news in Stockton and San Joaquin County. She can be reached at hworkman@recordnet.com or on Twitter @byhannahworkman. Support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.
This article originally appeared on The Record: San Joaquin County sheriff rejects DHS criticism in triple homicide case
Reporting by Hannah Workman, The Stockton Record / The Record
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By Hannah Workman, The Stockton Record | USA TODAY Network
