By Richard Hernandez
San Bernardino County, its politicians and its residents missed out on an opportunity to reap a huge financial windfall in the form of federal special program augmentation funding earlier this year when its highest-ranking officials – virtually all of whom are Republicans – elected to back Sacramento rather than the Trump Administration with regard to stepped up immigration law enforcement.
Top administration officials up to and including President Donald Trump himself were banking on and had indeed taken for granted that the political leadership in far-flung San Bernardino County, one of the last bastions of Republicanism in what Donald Trump considers to be off-the-charts liberal California and a gateway to more moderately political Arizona and Nevada, would fall in line with his efforts to aggressively remove unregistered and undocumented foreigners from the country. The president took it as a personal betrayal when the sheriff, who by tradition and wide reputation is the most powerful political figure in San Bernardino County, in the words of one federal official “pussed out” when the governor and leading members of the state legislature began pushing local and county officials to somewhat gratuitously declare their intent to comply with a nearly eight-year-old law that had been put in place during the first Donald Trump administration to undermine federal immigration control efforts then.
For president Trump and several of his top aides overseeing national security and immigration issues, there was immense disappointment when the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors – of which four of five members are Republicans – backed the sheriff in saying the county could be counted upon to abide by the Golden State’s unregistered alien sanctuary policy. That was interpreted by the recently installed second Trump Administration as an unmistakable signal that the governmental and law enforcement institutions in San Bernardino County would not be going along with what was at that point a three-quarters-gestated strategy to dismantle, county-by-county, California’s sanctuary status.
While statistics available to the government and the private sector are inexact, the incoming Trump Administration was function on an estimate that there were 127,681 illegal immigrants – that is to say undocumented aliens – in San Bernardino County in the weeks just prior to Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Of those, roughly 71.8 percent, or 91,675, were from Mexico, while 6.1 percent or 7,789 were from El Salvador and 4.3 percent or 5,490 were from Guatemala and just a tad under 11 percent (10.9938 percent) or 14,037 were from Asia.
The game plan was that the federal agencies Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, supported by the FBI and the DEA [the Drug Enforcement Administration working in conjunction with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and no fewer than four of the ten municipal police departments would, as early as April 10, begin the methodical process of rounding up the 127,681 known illegal immigrants. They were to be held, initially, in local rather than federal detention facilities.
In those cases where the circumstances under which they were arrested warranted – that is, they were found to be in violation of state law, including resisting arrest – they were to be charged and arraigned on those charges, which were to be prioritized but not made to the exclusion of federal charges that were to come later. Those taken into custody without any incident and under circumstances where there was no indication that they were engaged in any over criminal activity under state statutes, they were to be booked on and charged with violation of a federal law enacted in 1940 and which was frequently used during World War II but only sporadically in the years since but which remains on the books.
On June 28, 1940, the Smith Act, also known as the Alien Registration Act, altered Chapter 439.54 of Stature 67 of 18 U.S. Code § 2385, to, among other things, require all non-citizen adult residents, defined as those over the age of 14, to register with the federal government. Defined as a misdemeanor, it carried with it a penalty of six months in jail and a maximum fine of $5,000. Obtaining a conviction against a non-citizen on a violating the Alien Registration Act could, theoretically, for federal prosecutors, open the door for deporting the subject, pursuant to demonstrating further violations or acts deemed hostile to the United States or federal law. The Trump Administration intended to use such convictions as the basis for mass deportation proceedings.
The architects of the strategy believed, or at least hoped, that when word of what was taking place in spread within the subcommunity of illegal aliens, many of those not yet caught would elect to leave 20,105-square mile San Bernardino County for its geographically much smaller but far more densely populated neighbor, 4,083-square mile Los Angeles County. This, it was again hoped, would harden the attitude of the residents of Los Angeles County against overall population of illegal aliens/undocumented immigrants, further pressuring the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic elected leadership to move closer toward the Republican position with regard to immigration. Foremost in this regard was the prospect that the Democrats might choose to abandon or rescind the state’s amnesty declaration, which would result in large numbers of county sheriff’s departments and municipal police departments joining the federal fold in the effort to wholesale arrest the more than 2.7 million illegal immigrants/undocumented aliens in California.
The plan as formulated in Palm Beach, Florida, Manhattan, New York and Washington, D.C. was contexted on the assumption that San Bernardino County officials would cooperate with the Trump Administration once it was reestablished in the aftermath of the 2024 election and the vanquishing of the Joseph Biden Administration, which had been in lockstep with the California supermajorities in both the State Assembly and State Senate as well as Governor Gavin Newsom with regard to immigration policy.
The assumption that San Bernardino County would go along with the master plan was one that was logically arrived at. While California is overwhelmingly Democratic in its politics generally – with every state constitutional office from governor to lieutenant governor to state attorney general to secretary of state to controller to superintendent of public instruction to insurance commissioner held by a Democrat, 31 out of 40 seats in the California Senate and 60 of 80 in the California Assembly filled by Democrats, U.S. senators from California being Democrats and 43 of its 52 members of the California delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives being Democrats. Still, there are yet in the 163,696-square mile, 58-county Golden State five Republican enclaves remaining. One of those is San Bernardino County, the largest county geographically in the United States. Even though the sheer number of Democrats in the county has been greater than their Republican counterparts since 2009, the Republicans in San Bernardino County have continued to outdistance the Democrats for sixteen years and through eight consecutive election cycles. To the extent that there are some members of the State Senate and State Assembly and the U.S. Congress representing some of the people of San Bernardino County, that is, for the most part, because the Assembly districts, State Senate districts and Congressional districts that cover portions of San Bernardino County extend into nearby Riverside County or Los Angeles counties where the overwhelming number of votes in those districts are Democrats. Otherwise, in the California Assembly, Four of the Assembly’s 20 Republicans represent San Bernardino County. In the California Senate, two of the nine Republican seats held by a Republican cover San Bernardino County. Two of California’s nine Republican members of the U.S. Congress represent San Bernardino County. Of the county’s 24 city and town councils, 16 of them have more Republicans than Democrats. Four of the county’s five supervisors are Republicans. The district attorney is a Republican. The sheriff, the most powerful political figure in the county is a Republican. In 2022, when the four Republicans on the board of supervisors put a measure on the countywide November ballot asking whether residents wanted to secede from the Democrat-controlled California, it passed. In the 2024 presidential election, San Bernardino County voters favored Donald Trump over California’s favorite daughter Kamala Harris.
In the days and weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in as president for the second time on January 20, 2025, his allies and administrative officers, while playing their designs close to the vest, began in earnest the preparations for what was, and is yet, to be his second term’s immigration policy. A primary consideration was implementing it in places where it would succeed, and the success attained would not just sustain the program but project it forward toward wider and greater application, achieving deportations not just in the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands but well into the range of millions, multi-millions, putting more than a dent in what is estimated to be 12 million illegal aliens residing in the country without having been documented.
It was the pipe dream of many of the president’s supporters that more than half of the 12 million total might be banished from the country. There was a realistic prospect of this, some believed, not just as a result of an unprecedented number of deportation proceedings pursued to a conclusion but also as a result of anticipated decisions by a substantial percentage of those subject to such proceedings who were being interned en masse electing to willingly return to their country of origin in lieu of remaining in custody indefinitely.
Others in league with the president somewhat more soberly recognized that the program could not be initiated and brought to fruition at once, and that it would take well into the ninth, tenth or eleventh month of the second Trump administration to gear up into a program of that intensity. Once the machine was running, they believed, particularly if it could be spread beyond a mere handful of states into those parts of the union where the burden of providing social services for those they considered foreign freeloaders was on the brink of destroying the welfare system intended for truly needy Americans, the Trump Administration might finally be credited as living up to the goal of making America great again. In such a scenario, particularly if the goal of concentrating the deportation effort on those with criminal records was prioritized, expelling as many as one million undesirable aliens per year might not prove unrealistic in the second, third and last year of Donald Trump’s term in office.
Key to that success, it was absolutely clear to those seeking it, was including California – the self-declared sanctuary state and nation’s foremost safe haven for illegal aliens – as a primary target for the deportations. On multiple levels, California was indeed the primary target. First, it was home to more undocumented aliens than any other state and virtually as many as the two states, Texas and Florida, closest behind it. To declare those 2.7 million people as off limits from deportation when they represented fully 22.5 percent of the problem would mean, statistically, that the federal government would have to give up on, right from the start, removing more than one out of every five illegal aliens from the country, meaning the program’s prospect for success would be cut by more than one-fifth. Moreover, giving every undocumented foreigner in California a pass risked creating an incentive for those in the country anywhere else to consider pulling up stakes and moving to California. Even more troublesome was the precedent that the Golden State’s defiance represented and the chance that by letting Sacramento get away with outmaneuvering Washington, D.C. that some order of custom or exemplar would be created for others to do the same. The Trump administration had to take on California, bring all of its authority and might to bear, and establish that it is the federal government, not the states, that has the last word when it comes to immigration.
Senate Bill 54, also known as the California Values Act, passed in 2017, put in place California’s Sanctuary Law, prohibiting police from participating in immigration enforcement, but gave them “discretion” to cooperate with federal immigration authorities if the subjects they knew or suspected to be undocumented immigrants were to be released from custody after having been convicted of and served a sentence for assault, battery, use of threats, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, endangering children, burglary, robbery, theft, fraud, forgery, embezzlement, felony driving under the influence, bribery, escape from prison, trafficking in narcotics, kidnapping, false imprisonment, unlawful possession of a weapon, possession of an explosive device, money laundering and criminal profiteering, torture and mayhem, elder abuse, stalking, rape, any crime resulting in death or great bodily injury and solicitation of a crime.
As the Trump Administration’s plan was taking shape, an emerging question was whether law enforcement authorities in sufficient numbers in those areas of the state where there were substantial concentrations of illegal immigrants would adhere to federal law or state law, specifically the California Values Act/California Sanctuary Law. That dynamic carried with it the prospect of the goals of the Trump immigration policy succeeding or failing.
Within three weeks of Donald Trump reassuming the presidency, Amador County Sheriff Gary Redman gave indication of where he stood, publicly stating that he was ready to defy the solid Democratic political block in Sacramento and break California law by immediately contacting immigration authorities upon arresting anyone his department arrested who appeared to be in the country illegally. According to Redman, he believed he had a duty to uphold local, state and federal law and that in the hierarchy of laws, federal law trumped state law.
Pleased that Redman, interpreted things their way, Trump officials looked forward or actually took for granted that the sheriff in 2,195,611-population San Bernardino County, Shannon Dicus, would assume the same the same attitude as Redman had in 41,115-population Amador County. They well understood that getting the cooperation of law enforcement in San Bernardino County, the fifth largest county population-wise in California, in rounding up a substantial number of the estimated 127,681 undocumented foreigners within its confines would prove to be a major coup in the immigration control battle, one far more significant than would be achieved in expelling a good percentage of the estimated 805 illegal aliens residing in Amador County.
As it would turn out, however, Dicus was not prepared to line up with Redman as a member of the Trump Team.
The Trump Administration had designated April 10 as D-Day for the unfolding of its comprehensive plan to detain, process and repatriate to their native lands those who were failing to abide U.S. immigration law. By March, the coordination toward that eventuality was under way, focused primarily on 30 different states and the nation’s capital – and then within many of those states selected areas – where the numbers, situational considerations, preexisting relationships with the administration and generalized political atmosphere augered there would be positive results. On the administration’s radar screen were Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington, Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado, Tennessee, Connecticut, Oregon, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, New York, California, Utah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Montana. As those preparations progressed, elements within the individual state governments were made aware, either through direct contact with federal officials or indirectly through resource coordination efforts, of what was coming.
California State officials, through various means and personages signaled to San Bernardino County authorities that they were hip to what was being hatched at the federal level and in what was anticipated to be in coordination with San Bernardino County authorities, to include its sheriff’s department and at least some of its police departments. At once, San Bernardino County authorities found themselves under tremendous pressure to renounce any intent to coordinate with the federal government with regard to the mass deportations of illegal aliens within it jurisdiction.
At that juncture, on March 25 Sheriff Dicus put out a statement on Instagram, informing the community, “We understand that many in our community have concerns about immigration practices in San Bernardino County as they relate to the Sheriff’s Department. I want to assure everyone that our primary duty is to protect all community members, regardless of immigration status. As sheriff of San Bernardino County, my commitment is to public safety and the rule of law. Collaboration with our federal partners plays an essential role in addressing crime and protecting our communities. California Senate Bill 51 currently governs how state and local law enforcement agencies interact with federal immigration authorities. It limits cooperation between local law enforcement and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) As a law enforcement agency, we are committed to upholding the laws of California.”
Dicus’s statement continued, “If someone is a victim of a crime, their legal status does not affect our response. We are here to help. We do not ask about immigration status or require proof of citizenship to file a report or initiate an investigation. Our focus is on ensuring safety and justice for everyone in our community.
I have been meeting with community members to listen to their concerns and ensure that we address any issues affecting their safety and wellbeing.
In the same time frame, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who has over the years sought to establish himself as an indefatigable champion of law enforcement and the principles of rectitude he associates with it, been highly critical of Sacramento’s liberal approach to governance and social order and who earlier this year announced that he intended to seek the Republican nomination for California governor in 2026, put out a similar if only slightly more equivocal statement than Dicus’s, betraying that Trump Administration officials were likewise seeking the cooperation of Riverside County in moving forward with its immigration policy but that despite his previous statements of discontent with the State of California’s laissez-faire law enforcement, he wasn’t going to buck the California system by joining in with federal government to bring the illegal immigration crisis the nation faces under control.
Dicus’s and Blanco’s withdrawal of support sent the Trump Administration’s plans for intensified immigration law enforcement in California, starting in the Inland Empire and then mushrooming outward as the 2025 calendar to a temporary halt. That plan, a formulated, went forward elsewhere as of April 10, and has scored, on practically a daily basis since simultaneously spectacular hits and equally spectacular misses.
Prior to April 11, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued directives to those offices of the U.S. Attorneys around the country where there are heavy saturations of illegal aliens within their jurisdictions to have personnel familiar with immigration statures in place to initiate criminal cases against those in the country illegally and to start the deportation process. She told the U.S. Justice Department’s attorneys that they should in all cases where the facts will support them charge any foreign nationals who are not registered with the Immigration and Naturalization Service with failing to register, authorizing the use of “all available criminal statutes to combat the flood of illegal immigration,” including making use of the FBI, U.S. Marshals, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
On April 11, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department issued notices that the provision of the Alien Registration Act requiring all non-citizen adult residents of the age of 14 and above to register with the federal government was henceforth to be enforced. As of this week, 57,000 immigrants who have just arrived or who were previously living in the country while undocumented have registered.
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, at least 3.2 million immigrants who have not previously registered are subject to the Alien Registration Act as it is now being applied. Those foreigners in the country with visas or legal permanent residency and who during their previous contact with immigration authorities at U.S. ports of entry or through deportation proceedings made a declaration of their presence in the United States are not subject to the current enforcement regime, as they are already registered.
In jurisdictions where the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement had the cooperation of local authorities and/or law enforcement agencies, they carried out surveys and screenings of inmates in county jails. They further worked with local agencies, where those agencies were amenable to doing so, in conducting roadway or highway enforcement checkpoints. These succeeded in flagging thousands of illegal aliens.
Immigration agents who have been unleashed to ferret out and arrest illegal immigrants have been working efficiently since April 11.
In multiple metropolitan areas, from Texas to Florida to Illinois to New Jersey, Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents moved swiftly into factories, foundries, warehouses and other venues where there were heavy concentrations of undocumented individuals employed by companies or entrepreneurs who were abetting them in their violation of the law by employing them, essentially, off the books and paying them in cash, often at deflated rates, without reports to the Internal Revenue Service. In some of these instances, parallel cases have been filed against the employers; in others, the filing of such charges is pending.
By April 28, President Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Holman, announced the arrest of 100 undocumented migrants on serious criminal charges, including murder; murder; homicide; child sexual abuse; rape and sodomy of a child; contributing to the delinquency of a child and sexual activity; rape of a child; rape; sexual offense against a child; child pornography; possession of fentanyl and an illegal gun; lewd and lascivious acts on a child; lewd and lascivious acts in front of a child; sexual assault; rape; murder; murder; homicide; murder and robbery; homicide; sexual conduct on a child; rape; distribution of fentanyl; assault with a gun and rape; sexual assault on a child; multiple sexual offenses; sexual assault of a child; murder; continuous sexual abuse of a child; sexual abuse of children; sexual assault of a child; sexual assault of a child; sexual abuse of a child; sex offense with a child; assault with a gun and rape; sexual assault on a minor; sexual assault of a child, murder; and murder.
In one concerted multi-agency operation involving several city and county law enforcement agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and customs Enforcement and the Drug Enforcement Agency, over 800 illegal aliens were taken into custody.
A raid at a Colorado night club carried out shortly after 1 a.m. one morning netted 114 illegal aliens.
An operation against another location in Colorado based on information gleaned fro some of those picked up in the night club raid, according to the Department of Immigration and Custom Enforcement, resulted in numerous members of the MS-13 criminal organization.
Homan said, “This is an unprecedented success. The border is secure. President Trump is saving lives.”
The use of the Alien Registration Act was a combination of effective, controversial and legally contestable.
Two weeks prior to the initiation of the federal enforcement program, the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in March filed suit in and effort to block the registration requirement. District of Columbia Federal Magistrate Trevor McFadden denied the request in the early hours of April 11, allowing the Trump Administration to proceed.
Since April 11, 139,000 deportations have been initiated and over 100,000 effectuated. Challenges of its application were immediately raised. More often than not, federal judges overseeing the deportation hearings, upon being briefed, allowed the filings to proceed. In a handful of cases, however, federal officials were stymied. Well over 200 of those arrested and cited for violating the Alien Registration Act have acceded to being deported. Thousands more are on a trajectory to be transported out of the country by early next month.
At least four federal judges around the country questioned the use of the Alien Registration Act under the current conditions, short of a declared national emergency, although they did not explicitly disallow its use. Six deportation cases have been dismissed based on the government’s inability or failure to demonstrate that those charged with violating the act new that they had to report their presence to the government and therefore did not understand the law or have a clear intent to violate it.
After Judge McFadden’s ruling, federal prosecutors throughout the country began making charges against foreign nationals almost as fast as they were being rounded up.
An immediate test case emerged on April 11 in Louisiana with the filing of a criminal case against a Honduran national who had been in the country at that point approaching three years and was employed near New Orleans. Upon his being determined to be a foreigner after a routine traffic stop and that he was not on the Department of Homeland Security database which had gone online that day, he was transferred into federal custody and was charged along with six others in the New Orleans area who had been determined as well to not be in the database as registered foreign nationals.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Orleans, “The defendants evaded the legal way to enter the United States, and through doing that they bypassed the opportunity to register.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael B. North on May 19 ruled that the U.S, Attorney’s Office had not established “evidence that any of these defendants knew they were required to register” and even if there could be such proof provided or it was established that their ignorance of the law did not excuse them from having to make compliance with the Alien Registration Act “until very recently, there was no mechanism… to do so.” Judge North dismissed the charges against the defendants, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office is appealing that ruling. Five of the seven defendants remain in custody awaiting the outcome of that appeal. Two of the others already conceded their guilt and have been deported.
Many of those in custody have already agreed to be deported without any further contest. Some have sought to negotiate being released by agreeing to register under the Alien Registration Act. Others are seeking to put the American justice system through its paces, insisting on due process.
Meanwhile, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and other immigrant advocacy groups are trying to reach undocumented immigrants, including ones in custody and still at large, to tell them that they should not comply with the Alien Registration Act’s registration requirement without first obtaining the advice of legal counsel.
In reaction to the Trump Administration’s program, there has been substantial negative reaction, castigation of the administration and demonization of its principals by liberals, Democrats and opponents of immigration law enforcement in general, characterizing the president and those in the administration as well as the policies being pursued as racist, fascistic and that the arrest, jailing and deportation of illegal immigrants was illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane persecution akin to kidnapping and extrajudicial imprisonment.
On behalf of the immigrant population those advocating for them filed across no fewer than seven states lawsuits challenging the immigration law enforcement. State government officials in 22 states, along with the District of Columbia challenged Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, signed on January 20, 2025, the day of his inauguration, which eradicated the long-held interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment as giving anyone born in the United States citizenship, thus ending the birthright citizenship of the children of illegal immigrants as well as immigrants legally but temporarily present in the U.S., such as those on student, work, or tourist visas.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigrant Justice Center have filed suit to require that before the federal government expels migrants it must provide them with the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Having recovered from what it perceived as the unexpected betrayals of sheriff’s Dicus and Bianco which derailed, or at least delayed, its plans to initiate immigration policy reform in California in April, the Trump Administration has backed up and regrouped. Acting through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, Holman has resolved to proceed with actuating in California the immigration enforcement policy the panoply of federal agencies he is guiding have effectuated in 29 other states and the District of Columbia.
Previously, before Dicus and Bianco jumped ship, the Trump Administration was willing to offer San Bernardino and Riverside counties the carrot of an infusion of federal funds provided directly to the county’s various agencies and departments along with spending through other contracts, such as with repopulating the Adelanto Immigration and customs Enforcement Processing Center in Adelanto up to its near capacity of 2,000 after it had been reduced to hold just two inmates and was on the brink of full closure.
Now, however, in preparation for the next phase, San Bernardino County has been moved out of its most favored governmental jurisdiction status to the doghouse with some 40 other California jurisdictions who are to be given the stick. That stick consists of the withdrawal of federal funding in the form of grants, augmentation funding, endowment and/or any other type of subvention the federal government is at liberty to withhold.
Late last month, as Donald Trump and senior members of his administration surveyed the political landscape, yet stinging from having been kicked in the groin by Dicus and Bianco, they put the final touches on Executive Order 14287, subheaded “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens.” President Trump signed it on April 28.
“The prior administration allowed unchecked millions of aliens to illegally enter the United States,” the order states. “The resulting public safety and national security risks are exacerbated by the presence of, and control of territory by, international cartels and other transnational criminal organizations along the southern border, as well as terrorists and other malign actors who intend to harm the United States and the American people. This invasion at the southern border requires the Federal Government to take measures to fulfill its obligation to the States.”
The order then takes aim at those members of the Trump Administration consider to be traitors to the cause they are committed to, including Dicus and Bianco.
“Yet some state and local officials nevertheless continue to use their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of federal immigration laws,” the order states. “This is a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States. Beyond the intolerable national security risks, such nullification efforts often violate Federal criminal laws, including those prohibiting obstruction of justice (18 U.S.C. 1501 et seq.), unlawfully harboring or hiring illegal aliens (8 U.S.C. 1324), conspiracy against the United States (18 U.S.C. 371), and conspiracy to impede Federal law enforcement (18 U.S.C. 372). Assisting aliens in violating Federal immigration law could also violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (18 U.S.C. 1961 et seq.). Some measures to assist illegal aliens also necessarily violate Federal laws prohibiting discrimination against Americans in favor of illegal aliens and protecting Americans’ civil rights.”
In that section of the order headed “Consequences for Sanctuary Jurisdiction Status,” President Trump stated, “With respect to sanctuary jurisdictions that are designated under section 2(a) of this order, the head of each executive department or agency, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and as permitted by law, shall identify appropriate Federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions, including grants and contracts, for suspension or termination, as appropriate.”
Furthermore, the president wrote, “With respect to jurisdictions that remain sanctuary jurisdictions after State or local officials are provided notice of such status under section 2(b) of this order and yet remain in defiance of federal law, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to end these violations and bring such jurisdictions into compliance with the laws of the United States.”
Yesterday, Thursday May 29, the Trump Administration got down to brass tacks with the Department of Homeland Security’s publication of 517 jurisdictions across the country that it maintains are actively and/or passively preventing the enforcement of immigration law. Included on that list were San Bernardino County and Riverside County.
If the Trump Administration makes good on its word and withdraws federal funding from San Bernardino County, it could bring county officials across the board to their knees.
According to San Bernardino County Chief Financial Officer Matthew Erickson San Bernardino County is relying on the federal government to provide just about $1 billion of its $10.5 billion annual budget for fiscal year 2025-26.
One federal agent expressed the view that San Bernardino County officials had allowed their priorities to be disarranged and its loyalties misplaced. Noting that the lion’s share – roughly 62 to 64 percent – of the approximately127,681 illegal aliens in San Bernardino County originated in Mexico, he said, “Your leaders are letting something like 80,000 Mexicans who don’t have the decency or the sense to follow the simplest and most basic rules of the country they are living in to dictate what your policy is going to be. Well? Whose rules are you going to live by? Are you Mexicans or are you Americans? Who is going to foot the bill for their EBT cards and their Medicaid? The Mexican Government? What Donald Trump is saying is it isn’t going to be the American taxpayers anymore.”
The federal agent summarized the fundamental philosophical divide between both sides in the controversy. “They say they just want to make sure that ‘law-abiding’ immigrants and refugees have a sanctuary,” he said. “But that’s the point: They are not obeying the law if they are undocumented. They’re here illegally. Lawbreakers don’t merit sanctuary.”
Both Dicus and Bianco could have done much better for themselves and the counties where they are sheriff by exhibiting a little bit of backbone.
The rubber will meet the road and soon, he said, when federal funding is cut off and county officials have to make decisions on whether they want to continue to fund public safety operations and critical services and continue with paying pensions to the county’s retirees or whether they want to continue shielding people who are defying the law.
In Sacramento, the Trump Administration’s publicizing of Executive Order 14287 and its release of its list of sanctuary jurisdictions which it said were defying immigration law caught the attention of Governor Newsom, who detailed his legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, to author a polemic justifying the concept of a sanctuary state and sanctuary jurisdictions, while dismissing the federal criticisms of the jurisdictions and officials that participate in providing sanctuary protection to non-citizens as invalid.
“In United States v. California, the Unites States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit squarely held that California law limiting law enforcement coordination with federal immigration enforcement activities ‘does not directly conflict with any obligations that the [Immigration and Nationality Act] or other federal statutes impose on state or local governments,’ rejecting the United States’ argument that such conduct ‘unlawfully obstructs the enforcement of federal immigration laws.’”
Sapp further referenced another Ninth Circuit decision in City and County of San Francisco v. Barr that held the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempts to withhold a grant based on a similar theory were unlawful.
“Based on the court decisions discussed above, I request that you update the list to remove California and the California counties and cities whose policies align with those upheld by the courts,” Sapp wrote.
According to Holman, California officials are not viewing the illegal immigration crisis with the seriousness the problem merits. The figures bandied about by those seeking to minimize the matter use woeful underestimates of the actual numbers, he said.
The 12 million figure given by the Democrats is ridiculously low, he maintained. The actual number of illegal immigrants in the United States is closer to “20 million.” Roughly three-and-a-half-percent of those represent an unacceptable risk to all Americans, he said. “Last I looked,” he said, “there’s about 700,000 illegal aliens with criminal charges walking the streets of this country. That’s who we’re looking for now. That’s who we’re prioritizing.”