By Richard Hernandez
State and local officials from around California are gearing up to offer what they say will prove to be effective resistance to the incoming Trump Administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
For years, California has been at the forefront of the laissez-faire attitude toward illegal immigration into the country, even going beyond simply doing nothing to prevent the massive influx of undocumented foreigners across the international border into the country by declaring the entire state to be a sanctuary for foreigners who refuse to abide by U.S. immigration law.
In his ultimately successful campaign to return to residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., Donald Trump vowed to be even more effective in shuttering the borders than he was in his first term as president from 2017 to 2021. He is now engaged in preparations to make good on that promise.
This time around, President Trump says he intends to be even more diligent in conducting immigration law enforcement efforts by locating and deporting those residing in the United States illegally. He named Tom Homan, former police officer, political commentator and the acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 2017 until June 2018, to serve as his “border czar.” Together, Trump and Homan have vowed to carry out what Trump said would be “the largest deportation operation” in the country’s history. Not only does he intend to seal the border in a way that will ensure that no illegal aliens will make their way across the border, he intends to sen 11 million of those now in the country who are in the country illegally or are otherwise undocumented back to where they came from. Trump and Homan have made statements that this effort will emphasize reinstating a ban on those emigrating from what they have characterized as certain hostile majority-Muslim countries and redoubling efforts to seal the border with Mexico in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California as part of the second Trump administration’s immigration policy. Trump said mass deportations will begin on “Day 1″ of his new administration. That policy is to feature “zero tolerance,” which will, if necessary, entail enforcement at border crossings with adjacent internment camps to separate parents from their children if they cross over onto U.S. territory at the border. Continue reading →

In a secretive session from which the public was excluded conducted on the day before Thankgiving, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors apparently worked out the final details and then ratified the sale of 1,253 acres of “surplus” flood control property to an entity owned by a developer who has emerged in the last several years as one of the the most generous donors to the board members’ political war chests.
The outcome of the negotiating session and the vote it entailed was announced in a room located on the Fifth Floor of the county administration building behind double barrier consisting of a gate and a locked door beyond which members of the public are denied access. Immediately after the meeting concluded, county officers were closed, rendering information relating to whether the sale has been effectuated un available until December 2.
It is believed, but has not been confirmed, that the agreed-upon price for the acreage is $93 million, or $74,221.87 per acre.
The tentative deal, which was partially prevailed in documents that were contained as within the agenda packet for the regularly scheduled November 19 meeting of the board of supervisors on involves 1,252.21 which lie within what is now referred to as the Etiwanda Heights Neighborhood and Conservation Plan Area, contained within the current Rancho Cucamonga City Limits. The property, set amidst what under normal conditions is a dry alluvial creek, during fall, winter and spring rainstorms transforms into a raging river, was used historically by the San Bernardino County Flood Control District to manage stormwater runoff from the San Gabriel Mountains flowing south into both the Day Creek and Deer Creek streams. Over the past four decades, according to Noel Castillo, San Bernardino County’s chief flood control engineer and Terry Thompson, the director of San Bernardino County’s real estate services department, improvements made by the San Bernardino County Flood Control District, including the Day Creek and Deer Creek Debris Dam, spreading grounds, and channels, have rendered the property unnecessary for flood management and surplus to San Bernardino County Flood Control District needs. Continue reading →

By Mark Gutglueck
Big Bear Lake City Manager Erik Sund has weathered what previously appeared to be potentially crippling challenges to his authority, as the entirety of the city council, as it is currently composed, has voted to extend his tenure with the city at an enhanced salary.
More than a dozen members of the Big Bear community, including some of its more vocal, active and civically involved residents/officials, have pressed in recent weeks and months questions about Sund’s demeanor and attitude, including his ability to maintain his equanimity while under challenge or in the face of demands of and inquiries about his policy and approach.
In August 2022, Sund was brought to Big Bear to serve as city manager in the aftermath of Frank Rush’s departure as the mountain community’s top administrator some five months previously. It is not altogether clear, and no one is willing to say definitively, what the circumstances of Sund’s hiring were. In one version of events, he had already been terminated from or had departed the employment of San Clemente, where he had been city manager since 2021. In another account, he was yet working for San Clemente when he was offered the Big Bear Lake job, and he elected to leave San Clemente in the lurch.
Whatever the reality, Sund was willing to make the transition to the 5,231-population San Bernardino County city despite the consideration that doing so might be considered a professional step backward from managing the 64,293-population Orange County city of San Clemente. Big Bear Lake is the second-smallest municipal entity population-wise in the county, not too far ahead of Needles with its 4,959 occupants. Continue reading →

Based on the success that San Francisco has had with the tactic, San Bernardino officials are vigorously contemplating providing homeless individuals currently living on the city’s streets with one-way bus or train tickets to distant locations in an effort to thin their local ranks.
The brainchild of now outgoing Mayor London Breed, the City of San Francisco’s strategy of dealing with unwanted masses of unhoused people in recent months has consisted of discontinuing its automatic policy of providing a shelter to the dispossessed who city officials encountered, instead asking them if there was an alternate location they could go to where they had a relative or friends with whom they might stay or some other place where they would rather be than San Franciso. If the individual is open to leaving the Bay Area, the city has provided him/her with a bus or train ticket, to locations both within and outside of California instead of putting that person up for the night.
San Bernardino, like San Francisco, has an immense problem with large numbers of destitute having taken up residence in paupers’ quarters on the streets, in alleyways, in the Santa Ana or Lytle Creek riverbeds or around them, flood control channels, abandoned buildings, under railroad trestles or freeway overpasses, or hidden in chaparral or landscaping along the freeways, its parks and on the city’s sidewalks and public areas. Continue reading →

It is going to be a long time before a 32-year-old Fontana man will walk among free society following his October 28 conviction and his November 22 sentencing to 29 years to life in prison for attempting to rob a U.S. Secret Service Agent at gunpoint last June.
Jamonte Fitzgerald Johnson had at least four separate involvements in burglaries and criminal threats in San Bernardino County over a period of more than a decade, netting him four convictions that under California’s three-strikes law should have resulted in his confinement that would have rendered him unable to engage in the act which has now consigned him to prison for a period that will nearly equal or exceed his lifetime so far.
Records show that Johnson was arrested in Fontana for while engaged in burglary on August 18, 2010, and was thereafter charged with felony burglary PC-459, to which he pleaded no contest on January 4, 2011, and was sentenced to 487 days in jail.
On April 19, 2012, he was again arrested by the Fontana Police Department while engaged in burglary in Fontana, and was charged with PC 664/459-F, felony attempted burglary. He entered a guilty pleas to those charges on May 1, 2012, and was sentenced to 365 days in county jail. Continue reading →

Highway 330 reopened on November 22, a full two weeks prior to the previously rescheduled opening of the roadway connecting Highland in the Central Valley of San Bernardino County to the eastern San Bernardino Mountain communities.
The closure was necessitated by the ravages of the Line Fire, which charred 43,978 acres was ignited on September 5, in the midst of a long-running heat wave, at roughly 6 p.m. in northeast Highland near the intersection o of Baseline Road and Alpin Street by an arsonist in what is now believed to have been his third attempt at starting the fire.
Originally dubbed the Baseline Fire, it resisted efforts by the California Division of Forestry, known by the acronym CalFire, which serves as the contract fire department for the City of Highland, and the San Bernardino County Fire Division, to knock it down.
A CalFire incident management team was activated on September 6, as the steep terrain of the area into which the fire was spreading created challenges.
With the escalation of the surrounding heat, the fire began to expand rapidly on September 7 into the San Bernardino Mountains, and Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency existed in San Bernardino County as a consequence of the fire, and he authorized the use of a Fire Management Assistance Grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover elements of the firefighting effort.
Evacuation orders for the communities of Running Springs and Arrowbear Lake were issued, thereafter followed by evacuation orders to those in the communities of Angelus Oaks, Seven Oaks and all campgrounds and cabins in the area; Green Valley Lake north from Highway 18 along Green Valley Lake Road; the community of Forest Falls; and the community of Mountain Home Village. Those orders pertained to 11,400 structures under what was deemed to be immediate threat. Continue reading →

By Richard Hernandez
More than 200,000 so-called limbo immigrants – ones who are technically in the United States illegally as the foreign-born children of parents who entered the United States illegally but have in some fashion registered as being present in the United States and California specifically – are now eligible to buy California taxpayer-subsidized health insurance available through the Affordable Care Act.
This generosity to non-citizens while American citizens, most particularly males between the ages of 18 and 62, are left to fend for themselves is a matter of some controversy. There is a legitimate philosophical difference between people with regard to whether certain American citizens/taxpayers should be excluded from the benefits provided to those who are neither American citizens nor taxpayers, particularly when those benefits are being paid for by American taxpayers.
Furthermore, there are divided opinions among legal authorities, including American courts of law, as to whether providing benefits to non-citizens that are not available to American citizens is both legal and constitutional.
At the center of this difficult circumstance are the “Dreamers;” the Dream Act, which existed in a legislative bill form but which was never officially passed into law; and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, the legality of which has not been fully established.
Dreamers are the young foreign-born children of immigrants who came into the United States illegally, i.e., in defiance of U.S. Immigration Law and were or are essentially officially undocumented, but who, for the most part, are being educated in public schools. They are said to have the “dream” of obtaining legalized status and being allowed to remain in the United States, which in virtually all cases is the country that they in their life experience are most familiar with. The vast majority of Dreamers are from Mexico.
The Dream Act bill laid out and would have provided if passed, a pathway to permanent residency for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States by their parents if those young people met certain qualifications, such as not having been convicted of a felony or what was deemed “a serious misdemeanor.” The bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives but did not gain passage in the U.S. Senate when it was kept from consideration by a bipartisan filibuster. Continue reading →