Despite reports, widespread belief, and general perception to the contrary, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has been cooperating with the federal government in efforts to effectuate the arrests and deportation of individuals present in the country illegally, according to members of the department and documentation obtained by the Sentinel.
Immediately after Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, his administration began gearing up for an aggressive enforcement of U.S. immigration law. That effort included Tom Homan, who had served as the director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency during Donald Trump’s first term in office, taking charge of the former agency he headed as well as orienting himself with regard to all aspects of the function of the Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration,
the Department of Enforcement and Removal Operations and the Department of Justice. Those federal agencies were involved in rounding up illegal aliens, and were to be instrumental elements that Homan intended to wield in his appointed role, announced by President-elect Trump in November 2024, of “border czar.”
By February, Homan and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security hand initiated action in Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington. Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee, Connecticut, Michigan and Ohio, which ranked as the states with the second through the nineteenth largest number of undocumented foreigners living within them. Less intense, what were referred to as “token” efforts were taking place in Oregon, Indiana, Utah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Montana.
Prior to raids being initiated in those states, as had traditionally been the case with regard to the operations of the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, going back generations, 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.
Holman held off on launching what he and President Trump intended to be the largest, most energetic and ultimately most comprehensive illegal alien roundup, Operation Alta California, targeting the Golden State where the largest number of illegal aliens in any single state, estimated at 2.7 million, were residing.
Along with other members of the Trump Administration, Holman anticipated that California officials would prove less than cooperative, indeed obstructive, toward the effort to arrest and deport on a massive scale the illegal immigrants living in California. Continue reading →

Yucaipa has settled upon Sean Moore as its next city manager.
He is to replace, perhaps as early as next week, Jennifer Crawford, who has filled the role of interim city manager since April, shortly after the departure of Chris Mann, who was city manager for slightly over two years.
Moore has been the last four years the city manager of the Los Angeles County city of Lawndale. While Lawndale, at 1.97 square miles, is less than one-fourteenth the size of Yucaipa geographically, it’s population density of 14,733 per acre makes it far more urbanized than Yucaipa, with its population density of 1,982 per square mile.
It is the collective hope of the Yucaipa City Council that bringing Moore in as the city’s top administrator, making him the fourth person to hold the post in less than three years, will bring the curtain down on the most chaotic and unstable period in the 36-year history of Yucaipa.
The question at this point is whether Moore’s relatively uneventful tenure in the previous governmental posts he has held has adequately prepared for the vicissitudes of conflicting interests in Yucaipa, where the majority of residents want to maintain a slower-paced lifestyle in a semi-rural community while deep-pocketed developers and landowners of large swaths of property are focused on the opportunity they see to further enrich themselves by transforming the city from the home of 56,293 residents to a community more in keeping with the likes of Fontana and Corona with a mix of wall-to-wall residential subdivisions, complimentary commercial strip malls and a mix of warehouses that will zoom the population to upward of 100,000. Continue reading →

With Chino Hills Objecting

SBC County Is Shoehorning West End Cities Into Utilizing Fontana Homeless Navigation Center

San Bernardino County, which according to a survey conducted early this year has at least 3,837 people who have no roof over their heads within its 20,105-square mile confines, appears to be making significant strides in redressing the social scourge of homelessness.
At various points over the last decade or so, at least four of the county’s 24 municipalities and the county government itself has taken the lead in the effort to reclaim the lives and dignity of the region’s destitute.
Not surprisingly, those entities consistently most involved in that effort have included San Bernardino, Fontana and Victorville, three of the five places in the county where the problem of those living on the streets or under what are very dire circumstances is most pronounced.
Recently, Fontana has found itself in the lead once more. Somewhat ironically, however, it has drawn criticism from officials in other San Bernardino County jurisdictions for the intensity with which it has met the homelessness challenge head-on, even as the cities those officials critical of Fontana have shrunk from dealing with the homelessness challenge.
In San Bernardino there are five comprehensive homeless shelters. One is Mary’s Haven, a 12-to-24-month transitional living program for displaced women with young children. Another is Mary’s Village, which features 85 beds for homeless men, and which is run by the same Catholic social services missionaries who operate Veronica’s Home of Mercy I and Veronica’s Home of Mercy II, each providing 40 beds and other support and social service for homeless women. Another is the former All Star Lodge, which was converted by the County of San Bernardino in conjunction with the State of California’s Homekey Program into 76 single and two-bedroom units that provide interim to permanent housing for individuals and families. Continue reading →

Whether the $448.1 million the taxpayers and activists on both sides of the political divide spent on Proposition 50 between August and earlier this month was done in vain and now stands as an absurdist manifestation of the struggle for governmental dominance is now open to question, one that will be answered sometime over the next month or so as the U.S. Supreme Court will take an expedited look at whether the recent rash of gerrymandering that has gripped the country passes constitutional muster.
On January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, barely two-and-a-half months following the 2024 General Election, he embarked on a host of policy initiatives that gave promise of ultimately having a direct impact on the 2026 election.
Trump came into office with his party – the GOP – holding a slight 53-to-46 advantage in the U.S. Senate, including two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and an even thinner 219 to 213 seat majority ratio in the U.S. House of Representatives. His determination to be even more aggressive in propounding his political philosophy through executive action –  directives, mandates and orders – during his second term than had been the case during his first term was manifest with the tariff’s he imposed on the products of trading partners with which the U.S. is friendly and unfriendly alike, his insistence that the U.S. could no longer be counted upon to shoulder the entire financial burden of defending its allies militarily, deregulation of business, the reversal of energy policy which meant a deemphasis on renewables and a return to dependence on fossil fuels and a far more aggressive enforcement of immigration law.
Almost immediately, the president’s Democratic rivals began jockeying to exploit whatever ways those policies might be wielded to their advantage, with the very apparent goal of using the hard feeling some of those policies had engendered in the electorate to drive them to the polls a little less than two years hence in a bid to reverse the Republican advantage in both houses of the federal legislature into a Democratic advantage. Continue reading →

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors took a number of actions at its November 18 meeting.
One of the board’s votes was to proceed with a major expansion of the Arrowhead Regional Medical Center. The enlargement of the existing facilities at the main campus of the county hospital, also referred to by ints acronym ARMC, is intended to meet growing regional demand and improve patient care.
The board authorized expending $1 million to fund feasibility studies, preliminary design and cost analysis, ARMC will begin the planning and environmental review process for a future emergency department and intensive care unit expansion.
ARMC currently serves more than 80,000 patients annually in its Emergency Department. This expansion would allow the hospital to reduce wait times, relieve overcrowding and better serve the region’s residents with expanded trauma and critical care services. The county also adopted a reimbursement resolution enabling future bond financing of up to $350 million. Projected for construction in fiscal year 2028-29, the expansion reflects ARMC’s ongoing commitment to excellence in public hospital care.
The board approved a $5 million loan agreement to support the development of the E Street Veterans Apartments in the City of San Bernardino. Located at 1351 North E St., the project will transform 0.76 acres of donated land into a 30-unit permanent supportive housing (PSH) complex with on-site services for veterans who are experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. Continue reading →

The Colton City Council on Tuesday, November 18 voted to increase the $440 per month stipend they currently receive to $1,600.
That action was taken in the form of passing an ordinance, designated as Ordinance No. O-11-25, on a 3-to-2 vote, with council members Kelly Chastain, David Toro and John Echevarria is support and Mayor Frank and Councilman Luis González dissenting.
For the raise to be fully ratified, the council must confirm the vote it took Tuesday night at a future meeting. In Colton, as in other cities in California, a proposed ordinance is formally presented to the community as a meeting of the city council in what is referred to as a “reading.” Such readings constitute a procedural step in the legislative process, where the language of the ordinance being considered is either read or presented in a form that can be read by the citizenry to be subject to the ordinance, thus ensuring public notice. In the course of the “reading,” the legislative body, in this case the city council, is given the opportunity to discuss, amend and then vote on the ordinance.
The public then has the opportunity to weigh in further on the proposed ordinance at its second reading. In this case, that second reading is likely to take place at the city council’s upcoming December 2 meeting. Continue reading →