The San Diego region, like many communities on the southern border, saw a sharp drop in migrants entering the U.S. after the Biden administration made it harder to apply for asylum.
Thousands of newcomers who had crossed the border haven’t been forgotten, as they remain undocumented.
With President-elect Trump pledging to carry out mass deportations, leaders in San Diego are weighing how far to go in trying to protect people vulnerable to deportation and how much local law enforcement should cooperate with federal agents, the New York Times reports.
As such discussions unfold around the U.S., few places are seeing the debate play out as dramatically as San Diego County, where for a few weeks this year, the number of crossings was higher than in Texas and Arizona.
After Trump’s victory, the county's Board of Supervisors 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 investigative interviews by immigration officials inside jails and prohibiting the use of county resources for immigration enforcement.
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 tensions over immigration.
The chair of the Board of Supervisors, Nora Vargas, is 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,” Vargas said on social media.
The issue of how much local jails cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement 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 "detainer" requests 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 fell during the pandemic). Through the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years, during the Trump administration, ICE sent out more than 300,000 such requests.
Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations has plunged local governments deeper into the debate over immigration enforcement, said Ahilan Arulanantham of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA 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.”