The San Diego region, like many communities that hug the southern border, saw a sharp drop in migrants entering the United States after the Biden administration made it harder to apply for asylum.
But thousands of newcomers who had crossed the border haven’t been forgotten, and even as many of them made their way to other corners of the country, some remain in and around San Diego, still undocumented.
Now, with President-elect Donald J. Trump pledging to carry out mass deportations, leaders in San Diego have been weighing how far to go in trying to protect people vulnerable to deportation and how much local law enforcement should cooperate with federal agents.
Such discussions are unfolding around the country after Mr. Trump won back the White House promising to curb immigration and tighten up border security.
But few places have been seeing the debate play out as dramatically as San Diego County, which sits on California’s border with Mexico, and where for a few weeks this year, the number of crossings was higher than in Texas and Arizona.
After Mr. Trump’s victory, the Board of Supervisors for San Diego County moved to bolster protections for migrants by requiring federal agents to obtain a judicial warrant for any undocumented immigrants they want to pick up from a local jail, banning any investigative interviews by immigration officials inside jails and prohibiting the use of county resources for immigration enforcement.
But even in a state with some of the strongest shields for undocumented immigrants, San Diego County was ratcheting up the fight over immigration enforcement, and the new protections drew swift and pointed criticism.
And it wasn’t just the Trump administration’s designated border czar who denounced the warrant mandate. San Diego’s own sheriff, who oversees the county jails, said she wouldn’t enforce the requirement.
The pushback by the county’s top law enforcement officer, who, like a majority of the county supervisors, is a Democrat, underscored emerging tensions over immigration even among officials who not long ago might have seemed more closely allied.
In what appears to be another sign of the friction in San Diego, the chair of the Board of Supervisors, Nora Vargas, said on Friday that she was stepping down, just weeks after being re-elected. “Due to personal safety and security reasons, I will not take the oath of office for a second term,” Ms. Vargas said on social media.
The issue of how much local jails cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement has long been top of mind for federal officials. The cooperation, however, will be key for the Trump administration’s efforts to increase deportations.
When an immigrant is arrested and fingerprinted, the information is transmitted to ICE. Once ICE learns that an immigrant is in custody, federal officials often send requests — known as detainers — for the local jail to notify them well before an immigrant is to be released, so federal agents can take them.
In four of the last six fiscal years, ICE officials have issued more than 100,000 such requests (the numbers plunged for two years during the pandemic). Through the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years, during the Trump administration, ICE sent out more than 300,000 such requests.
Deportations have been carried out under every modern president, and it was under Mr. Obama, a Democrat, that the debate over so-called sanctuary cities really took off.
But it is Mr. Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations that has plunged local governments ever deeper into the debate over immigration enforcement, said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law. “I think people feel the weight of it more because most people think Trump can’t accomplish quote unquote mass deportation without extensive cooperation with state and local governments.”
After the election, Los Angeles passed a new ordinance prohibiting city resources from being used for immigration enforcement. Yet elsewhere in the country, officials are rethinking their arms-length relationships toward ICE.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has repeatedly raised the possibly of working more closely with ICE and altering the city’s sanctuary laws to make it easier to detain migrants in jails on behalf of immigration agents. And in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has proposed a budget that would strip funding from local agencies that refuse to respond to ICE requests.
But the clash in San Diego could make it a hot spot in the debate over local cooperation with federal authorities. Thomas D. Homan, who has been named “border czar” in the upcoming administration, told The New York Post that San Diego’s new policy is “10 times worse” than California’s state sanctuary law. Under San Diego’s new policy, federal agents would be required to obtain a judicial warrant before jail officials could transfer someone to ICE custody or hold someone beyond an inmate’s release date on behalf of federal officials.
In saying she would not enforce San Diego’s new requirement, the county sheriff, Kelly Martinez, said in a statement that, “While protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants is crucial, it is equally important to ensure that victims of crimes are not overlooked or neglected in the process.”
Ms. Martinez said she does support the state law that limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities. It allows for the transfer of prisoners being held in connection with certain crimes from ICE once they are eligible for release.
Under the Biden administration, the number of people transferred from San Diego jails to ICE custody has declined sharply. Last year, 25 people were transferred to ICE after serving time for crimes such as grand theft, murder and drug trafficking. By comparison, in 2017 San Diego transferred 1,143 people, according to the sheriff’s department.
It’s easier and safer for ICE to arrest people at jails than on the streets, and the agency can round up far more people that way than it can by arresting people in homes and workplaces or on the street.
Corey Price, a former senior ICE official, said it would become all but impossible to pick up immigrants from local jails.
The amount of time it would take to obtain warrants for each case “is untenable,” he said. “The law is clear in that an immigration officer only needs an administrative warrant” to arrest an undocumented immigrant.
Mr. Arulanantham, the U.C.L.A. law professor, said requiring a judicial warrant is consistent with due process and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
And in the case of detainees whose sentences had been completed, a warrant would be the only lawful way to hold them until ICE could pick them up, Professor Arulanantham said. “I definitely think that a detainer or transfer of somebody without a warrant after their sentence is over violates the Fourth Amendment.”
It is unclear how the conflict between the sheriff and the Board of Supervisors will play out. Local immigration advocates argue that the state’s law, known as the California Values Act, requires law enforcement to also abide by local policies on immigration.
In a letter to the sheriff, Ian M. Seruelo, the chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, said, “We hope that your statement was a mere misunderstanding on your part of the full scope of the California Values Act, and not a flagrant disregard for state law, our democratic processes and our constitutional rights.”
In an interview, Mr. Seruelo, who is also a practicing immigration lawyer, said that any coordination between local law enforcement and immigration agents harms public safety because it makes immigrants less likely to report crimes or cooperate as witnesses. “A lot of families here in San Diego have an undocumented member,” he said. “If that level of trust is diminished toward local law enforcement, it will discourage many San Diegans from reporting crime or from accessing county resources or services.”
The lone dissenting vote on San Diego’s Board of Supervisors came from Jim Desmond, a Republican, who said there already are protections for immigrants reporting crimes or dealing with the local police, who are barred from asking about immigration status.
“So we’re talking about people that have already committed the crime, they’ve already been tried for the crime and convicted and sentenced and they are in our jails,” he said. “And so this has nothing to do with reporting, doesn’t put anyone in jeopardy for reporting. All this does is allow our sheriffs to let ICE know that these people are in our custody and when they are going to get out.”
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