Kembery Chirinos-Flores Is Dead, Another Sanctuary City Casualty
Santa Clara County chose the California Values Act over two ICE detainers. A young mother paid with her life.
On the evening of January 7, officers in Sunnyvale, California, responded to a report of a shooting on Vienna Drive. They found 24-year-old Kembery Chirinos-Flores in her car, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She leaves behind a five-year-old son.
On March 5, Santa Clara County authorities arrested two Honduran nationals for her murder: Franquin Inestroza-Martinez and Gerzon Jose Chirinos-Munguia. Chirinos-Munguia is the father of her child. Inestroza-Martinez also had an outstanding arrest warrant for a separate homicide in New Jersey: the March 2025 killing of 55-year-old Esteban Vicente Sacalxot, found dead from gunshot wounds in his Trenton home. Neither man should have been in the country.
The record is damning, and it is specific. Inestroza-Martinez was caught entering the United States illegally in June 2013, arrested, and removed. In February 2018, he was caught again, committing the felony of illegal reentry, and removed a second time. He entered a third time at an unknown date. Chirinos-Munguia was caught by Border Patrol in May 2015 and removed. He reentered illegally, and by April 2018 had been arrested in Santa Clara County for battery and false imprisonment. In September 2019, he was arrested again for domestic battery and threatening crime with the intent of terrorizing. ICE issued detainers after both arrests, asking Santa Clara County to hold him for transfer. Both times, the county released him without notifying ICE.
The mechanism that made this possible has a name: the California Values Act, signed by Governor Jerry Brown on October 5, 2017. The law prohibits local law enforcement from inquiring about immigration status and restricts cooperation with federal immigration agents. It is not an oversight. It is a policy choice, made by elected officials, with foreseeable consequences. Santa Clara County’s politicians chose to honor that statute over the detainer requests of federal agents whose job was to prevent exactly what happened on Vienna Drive.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis stated the obvious: these men should never have been able to commit these killings. But the statement, however accurate, understates the structural problem. Sanctuary policies do not merely fail to prevent violent crime by illegal aliens. They actively obstruct the one federal mechanism designed to intervene before the crime occurs. The detainer exists precisely for cases like Chirinos-Munguia’s: a man with a documented history of violence against women, already in custody, whom ICE had specifically flagged. The county chose not to act. Kembery Chirinos-Flores paid the price.
Sunnyvale Public Safety Chief Dan Pistor described the victim at a press briefing as a young woman in the prime of her life, working two jobs, raising her son. The child survived the shooting. He is now in the custody of Child Protective Services. His mother is dead. His father is charged with her murder.
The first Trump Administration sued California over the Values Act in March 2018. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed the federal government’s claims against SB 54 in their entirety. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2019, holding that California has the right under the anti-commandeering doctrine to decline participation in federal immigration enforcement. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in June 2020. The law remains in place. Every ICE detainer ignored under its authority is a bet placed with someone else’s life. In this case, the house won, and a five-year-old boy lost everything.
