"We are putting parents on notice," then-California attorney general Kamala Harris warned at her 2011 inauguration. "If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law."
Two years later, Cheree Peoples, a single mom of a special needs child, was jailed under a truancy law that Vice President Harris championed as San Francisco district attorney and later as attorney general.
Harris repeatedly asserted the need to crack down on truancy during her law enforcement career. "These children will invariably be what will end up in our criminal justice system," Harris said while testifying in favor of a statewide truancy bill. In her 2011 inaugural address, Harris said it was "time to get serious about the problem of chronic truancy in California." She noted that as San Francisco district attorney, she "threatened the parents of truants with prosecution" and saw truancy rates go down.
But Peoples was not some deadbeat parent allowing her children to play hooky. Her daughter Shayla has sickle cell anemia, a rare genetic condition that afflicts its sufferers with chronic pain. After Shayla, then 11 years old, missed 20 days of school in 2013, police officers arrested Cheree for violating the truancy law, a misdemeanor that carried a $2,500 fine and up to one year in jail. Peoples, who had an infant son when she was arrested, battled with the court system for two and a half years to clear her arrest, which she was worried would hurt her future job prospects.
"It hurts that some of the policies in which [Harris] governed has criminalized people like me," Peoples said in a Twitter broadcast this week.
Peoples’s story gained national attention during Harris’s presidential campaign in 2019 as an example of the conflict between Harris’s image as a progressive champion and her tenure as California’s top cop. Peoples’s saga has gained renewed attention after Harris’s surprise ascent to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
"Kamala Harris was the attorney general … which means she was the boss of the person who came and arrest me," Peoples said during the broadcast.
"Her name is attached to that law, because she pushed it to the governor without the people's vote."
Harris’s crackdown on parents appears at odds with her personal narrative, as well as causes she has claimed to champion on the campaign trail. "I was raised by a single mother—I know firsthand how stressful and costly it is to juggle work and school schedules," said Harris, who has two stepchildren with her husband, corporate lawyer Doug Emhoff.
Harris has lamented that in "our criminal justice system, a single mother can be held in jail awaiting trial for days, weeks, months, or even years—not because she’s a threat to her community, but simply because she cannot afford to make bail."
But Peoples says Harris’s anti-truancy initiative fell hardest on precisely those groups Harris now says she wants to help. Parents charged under the California law are "more than likely … low-income. Most of the time we’re single parents," said Peoples, who has been homeless at times throughout her legal battle.
According to Peoples, she and other parents charged under the truancy law became scapegoats of California officials struggling to shore up the Golden State’s chronic budget deficits. She was arrested by the county's gang prevention team, according to local reporting at the time. She was released the same day she was booked, but it was only after a lengthy court battle that the charges were dropped, a reporter who interviewed Peoples said during the 2020 campaign.
"They intertwined truancy with the economic issue with California, and the deficit," Peoples said on the broadcast. "How much money that it’s costing the state because of these truant kids. I was the reason, I’m the fault the state was broke because my child was sick."
"But it even cost more money to trial me for two and a half years."
According to Peoples, she was arrested even though she had a 504 plan, an agreement between school districts and parents to provide care for students with disabilities. Peoples was ultimately arrested after she declined to take Shayla to school to prove to administrators her daughter was truly sick.
"You want me to send my child to school like that? I’m going straight to the ER," said Peoples, who displayed videos of her daughter in the midst of a painful sickle cell flare-up. "This is what I was faced with when I see my child in sickle cell pain, and you want me to bring her to school first, for you to tell me she’s too sick to come to school?"
Harris's presidential campaign didn't return a request for comment.
Peoples said she is not a supporter of former president Donald Trump, is "not political," and would be "very, very happy to see a black woman elected."
But she acknowledges resentment towards Harris, who has not apologized over the truancy bill.
"I’m not political. I’m a mom that’s just trying to take care of her daughter, trying to make a way like everybody else."