The sheriff of San Diego county defied a new policy limiting county cooperation with federal immigration authorities, setting up a showdown over California’s efforts to shield residents from Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans.
On Tuesday, San Diego county supervisors voted to prohibit its sheriff’s department from working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the federal agency’s enforcement of civil immigration laws, including those that allow for deportations.
California law already generally prohibits cooperation but makes exceptions for those convicted of certain violent crimes. The new policy brings San Diego in line with seven other counties in California, including Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, which recently adopted a policy that goes beyond state law.
“We will not allow our local resources to be used for actions that separate families, harm community trust or divert critical local resources away from addressing our most pressing challenges,” said Nora Vargas, who joined two other Democrats on the board of supervisors to approve the policy.
But shortly after, Sheriff Kelly Martinez said the board does not set policy for the sheriff, who, like the supervisors, is an elected official. She said she would not honor the new policy.
“Current state law strikes the right balance between limiting local law enforcement’s cooperation with immigration authorities, ensuring public safety and building community trust,” said Martinez, whose office is non-partisan but has identified as a Democrat.
Ice has limited resources to carry out the mass deportations that Trump wants, forcing it to rely heavily on local sheriffs to notify the agency of people in their custody and hold them temporarily, if asked, to allow federal officials time to arrest them on immigration charges.
During Trump’s first term, limiting cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration enforcement was one of the key ways states such as California tried to protect its non-citizen residents from deportation.
San Diego county, with 3.3 million residents and its location on the US border with Mexico, is emerging as a key area where those tensions will play out. Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, has singled out the county as a place where the incoming administration’s plans are complicated by “sanctuary” laws, a loose term for state and local governments that restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Laws denying Ice access to county jails “put the community at risk”, Homan argued in an appearance on Fox on Sunday.
Vargas said the exception in state law allowing sheriffs to work with Ice for people convicted of violent crimes had resulted in the county transferring 100 to 200 people a year to immigration authorities. Under the new policy, Ice will need a judge’s order to get help from the county.
As Trump returns to office, immigrants’ rights groups in California have been pushing for lawmakers to expand the state’s sanctuary law by restricting state prisons from coordinating with Ice, further limiting federal access to jails and blocking data sharing between local law enforcement and immigration agents.
