By Richard Hernandez and Mark Gutglueck
A string of seemingly unrelated, semi-related and related events has, apparently, pushed San Bernardino County to the forefront of the controversy over Donald Trump Administration’s intensified crackdown on illegal immigration.
A noteworthy element of the matter is the recent sharp reversal in the unexpected leniency toward those present in the country without federal government authorization which was evinced by the Inland Empire’s leading law enforcement figures last year. This has stirred up a degree of confusion, indeed uncertainty, that has impacted just how outgoing, sociable and willing a significant segment of the community is to interact openly and frequent many public locations or governmental facilities.
The contrast in the attitude and approach of those in the Joseph Biden Administration with that shown by the functionaries in the Trump Administration regarding the proliferation of undocumented immigrants in the United States was a major focus in the traditional and newfangled media throughout the four years Biden was in office and grew into a pointed issue as first Biden and then Kamala Harris served as the presumptive and then the actual Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election.
At one point during the campaign, Trump had charged that 21 million immigrants had poured across the U.S. borders while Biden was president. Biden’s team was willing to concede that the actual number was only half of that, at somewhere between 10 million and 11 million. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory over Harris, amplified immigration enforcement was widely anticipated, although the extent to which it would occur among the general public was unknown.
In the November 2024 election, the Republicans had secured a trifecta, as Trump’s victory was accompanied by the GOP flipping U.S. Senate seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana to achieve a 53-47 majority in the upper legislative house while retaining control in the House of Representatives by a narrow 218-seat to 212-seat advanatage. The control of his party over Congress was set to last through until the midterm election in 2026, and President Trump and his advisors recognized that they would need to strike while the iron was hot and get as much accomplished during the first two years of his second go-round as chief executive, given how closely the Democrats were nipping at the Republicans’ heels and a turnaround in which the Democrats might take back one or both houses of Congress in 2026.
Plans were made to hit the ground running shortly after the January inauguration, as Tom Homan, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump Administration from 2017 until 2018 was designated to serve as the so-called border czar.
How this effort was to be framed, i.e., represented to the public, was an item of discussion. Even before Trump was sworn in, Democrats were seeking to define the parameters of what was to, during the second Trump Era, consititue an “illegal alien.” The deportation effort should be limited to targeting actual criminals, the Democrats reasoned. Only those undocumented foreigners who had been convicted of serious crimes – felonies – should be subject to removal, they suggested, indeed were insisting. Those who were eligible to speak for the incoming Trump Administration, sensing that they were gaining ground in the public debate, went along with this talk, at least ostensibly.
Certainly, they said publicly, they were all for prioritizing expelling those foreigners who had criminal records. They utilized publicly available Department of Justice figures to enumerate those foreigners from around the country who had felony convictions, in particular those who had either been found guilty in a court of law or had entered guilty pleas to 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. Those so adjudged totaled at least 800,000 around the country.
While those within the inner sanctum of the Trump [team] were willing to let the Democrats believe that the deportations might confine themselves to rooting out one out of every 15 undocumented foreigners in the country, they were doing so only to lull them into complacency so they could effectuate their real plan. Trump and his supporters did not draw a distinction between aliens who had simply found their way into the United States without registering as visitors and those who had been arrested and found guilty.
Inherent in this was a huge philosophical difference between Democrats on one side and Republicans, Trumpist Republicans in particular, on the other. To Democrats, crossing into the United States in secret and hiding from the authorities does not constitute a crime, or, if it is a crime, is a de minimus one. To Trump and his supporters, sneaking into the country and failing to register with the government is a violation of of the Smith Act, which was passed into law on June 28, 1940, nearly six years before Donald Trump was born. Also known as the Alien Registration Act, the Smith 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. The Trump Administration intended to arrest any foreigner living unregistered in the United States, obtain an expedited conviction against him or her, and then utilize that conviction to establish that person as a criminal and use it as the basis for an equally expedited deportation proceeding.
California, as a self-declared sanctuary state and nation’s foremost safe haven for illegal aliens as they were now defined by the incoming administration – 2.7 million of them, became a priority in the intended deportation effort. Fully 22.5 percent of those in the country without authorization were scattered all about the Golden State. If the administration could succeed there, removing more than one out of every five illegal aliens in the country, the overall program’s prospect for success would be boosted, as elsewhere, with the possible exception of Texas, the geographical and dispersement issues were not as intense, and both a model of and reputation for success would, they believed, propel the undertaking forward. Were the federal government to allow itself to be stood off by the Democrat-dominated state government’s assertion of sanctuary protection for those defying federal immigration law, giving every undocumented foreigner in California a pass, it would risk creating an incentive for those similarly unlawfully present in the country anywhere else to consider pulling up stakes and moving to California, the Trumpists figured. Even more troublesome was the precedent the Golden State’s defiance represented and the chance that by letting Sacramento get away with outmaneuvering Washington, D.C., 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 had 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 a series of serious felonies.
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.
Ideally, the administration wanted to log an impressive number of arrests and deportations in California’s two most iconic locates – Los Angeles and San Franchisco. That was undoable, however. It went without saying that the Trump Administration could not count upon the county sheriffs in Los Angeles County or San Francisco County nor the San Francisco Police Department nor the vast majority of the municipal police departments in Los Angeles County to assist in the round-up of illegal aliens within their jurisdictions.
Looking over their options with regard to which among California’s ten most-inhabited counties other than the nearly 13-million population Los Angeles County would be likely to prove most supportive of its agenda and have a political leadership willing to interpret federal policy as trumping Senate Bill 54/the California Values Act/California Sanctuary Law, they concluded that there best bet was with, in descending order, 920,000-population Kern County, 2.2 million-population San Bernardino County, 2.5 million- population Riverside County, 1 million-population Fresno County, 3.2 million-population Orange County, 3.3 million-population San Diego County, 1.6 million population Sacramento County, 1.9 million-population Santa Clara County  and 1.6 million-population Alameda County. Factors in the analysis of where the first phase of what was to become known as Operation Alta California extended to the anticipated cooperation of local officialdom; how target-rich of an environment it would prove, meaning, essentially, the concentration of illegal aliens within the population; the sheer numbers of illegal aliens, such that if the effort proved successful the numbers arrested, processed and actually deported would prove impressive. It was ultimately decided that when the federal government was to kick off Operation Alta California in late February or March 2025, it would be concentrated on San Bernardino County and Riverside County, where there were, 127,681 and 132,324 known/suspected illegal aliens residing respectively.
San Bernardino County is one of what is considered five remaining bastions of Republicanism in California. Four of its five county supervisors are Republicans. The majority of votes for state or federal legislators cast in San Bernardino County are for Republicans. Though there is a concentration of Democratic voters in the belt stretching from Fontana eastward through Bloomington, Colton, Rialto, Muscoy and into San Bernardino, such that Democrats tend to get into office to represent those areas, in most places elsewhere in the county the Republican to Democratic ratio is more even and far greater Republican voter turnout has resulted in those areas, by lopsided margins, being represented by politicians who are Republicans rather than Democrats. Both the sheriff of San Bernardino County, Shannon Dicus, and the District Attorney, Jason Anderson, are Republicans. In Riverside County, Democrats have made strides in recent years in evening themselves with the once far-more-dominant Republicans, but both the sheriff, Chad Bianco, and the District Attorney, Mike Hestrin, are Republicans.
Trump officials looked forward or actually took for granted that Dicus, as the sheriff in 2,195,611-population San Bernardino County, and Bianco, as the sheriff in 2,478,600-population Riverside County, would offer them the unfettered cooperation of the law enforcement machinery at their command. Federal officials well understood that getting the cooperation of law enforcement in both Riverside County, the fourth largest such jurisdiction in California, and San Bernardino County, the fifth largest county population-wise in California, and thereby collaring a substantial number of the more than a quarter of a million undocumented foreigners within those two combined 27,406-square mile confines would prove to be a major coup in the immigration control battle.
The architects of the strategy believed, or at least hoped, that when word of what was taking place spread within the subcommunity of illegal aliens, many of those not yet caught would elect to leave both San Bernardino County and Riverside County for the geographically smaller but far more densely populated 4,083-square mile Los Angeles County. This, it was again hoped, would harden the attitude of the residents of Los Angeles County against the 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 assumption that San Bernardino County and Riverside 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 – there yet remain patches within the 163,696-square mile, 58-county Golden State that defy the trend.
A major law enforcement official in a somewhat smaller but nevertheless-Republican-leaning region of the state lying further to the north, Amador County Sheriff Gary Redman, gave indication of where he stood just as Donald Trump was assuming the presidency for the second time, publicly stating he was ready to defy the solid Democratic political block in Sacramento and break California law by immediately contacting immigration authorities upon his department arresting anyone 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 hierarchy, federal law overrode state law. With Redman unabashedly maintaining that he stood ready to ensure that every last one of the known or suspected 805 illegal aliens in 41,115-population Amador County would be hunted down and removed from the territory over which he had law enforcement authority, Trump’s people assumed Dicus and Bianco were patriots indistinguishable from Redman, and would back their commander-in-chief with no less intensity.
Just as the Trump Administration was putting the final touches on the Operation Alta California plan of operation, what was to be an intense blitzkrieg across the internal swathe of Southern California east of Los Angeles County, one that was to move with such alacrity that it could not be resisted, Bianco went south on them.
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.
On February 6, 2025, Bianco, who 11 days later would announce he was to make a gubernatorial run in 2026, publicly stated that his deputies “have not, are not and will not engage” in immigration enforcement. He insisted the public upsurge in concern over California law enforcement agencies’ cooperation with the federal government’s immigration authorities was a reaction to “disingenuous” and sensationalistic media coverage of “irresponsible” statements and “misinformation and fear-mongering from dishonest politicians, social media [and] immigration activists.”
Bianco’s defection from a plan he had not officially signed onto but which it was assumed he was lined up with necessitated discarding what was shaping into Plan A and an accompanying delay. The Inland Empire remained as the primary early focus of Operation Alta California, with officials intending to nearly double the manpower that would go into an intensive effort to locate virtually every one of the 127,681 unregistered foreigners residing in San Bernardino County, with lightning strikes where they lived, worked, worshiped, congregated and shopped. There would be no sanctuary. No one and no place was to be off limits or spared and stores, churches, public buildings and facilities including courts and the Mexican and Guatemalan consulates in downtown San Bernardino were fair game.
All order of preparations had been made, with equipment, material, supplies and vehicles being staged near and on federal owned or leased properties and parking lots for or land surrounding post offices, the Loma Linda Veterans Administration Hospital, Federal Aviation Administration facilities, IRS offices, Social Security field offices, military facilities, the Seven Oaks Dam as well as arsenals including those jointly operated with the California National Guard.
Word was passed to the sheriff’s department that dozens or even scores of its personnel would be monopolized in operations coordinated with federal officials beginning as early as March 27 and that the county would be eligible to file for reimbursement to cover deputies’ overtime. Just before initiation of the enforcement program, on March 25, Sheriff Dicus put out a statement on Instagram, crossing the Trump Administration up. He informed those following him, “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.”
At a critical juncture, just as the Trump Administration was to initiate action to back up its pledge to bring the illegal immigration crisis the president insisted the nation faces under control, Bianco and Dicus indicated they weren’t going to buck the California sysem by cooperating with the federal government in moving forward with the Trump Administration’s departure from the Biden Administration’s laissez-faire immigration policy. This entailed yet another delay and the discarding of Plan B and the forumulation of Plan C.
Ultimately, when Operation Alta California got under way, it was initially focused on Los Angeles, greater Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, locales where the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were less than welcome, along with two other locales where federal agents counted on and received a more hospitable welcome, Kern County and Amador County. Despite the deployment of a massive amount of manpower, the kickoff and continuing application of Operation Alta California proved to be far less effective and much more problematic than the Trumpsters had hoped for.
Despite the support for and lack of opposition to the roundups in Kern and Amador counties, the numbers were less than impressive when the operation began in April 2025. In Kern County, a task federal force spearheaded by 65 Border Patrol Agents managed to find and take into custody 78 illegal aliens in the initial push, fewer than the number of arrestees the architects of Operation Alta California had expected to capture in the first hour of the effort in either San Bernardino or Riverside counties. In Amador County, agents made slow but decent progress, netting just under one-fifth of the 805 illegal aliens residing there in the first five days they were in action before they were summoned to Los Angeles County in mid-April.
Dicus’s and Blanco’s withdrawal of support meant the Trump Administration’s plans to score a spectacular psychological victory by an effective show of intensified immigration law enforcement in the Inland Empire and then mushrooming outward in the Spring of 2025 throughout the state was not achieved. Instead, the actual enforcement/deportation program went forward in a somewhat unbalanced and uneven fashion, achieving a few impressive hits and an equal or even greater number of spectacular misses.
Having to start cold and operate primarily in Los Angeles and its immediately surrounding communities proved highly problematic.
In early April 2025, then-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 statutes 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.
In Los Angeles, where there is a heavy concentration of undocumented aliens and something on the order of one in every 17 people is an illegal alien, federal agents were remarkably successful in locating and encircling those they were targeting, initiating stops and detaining not just those they had moved in on but others who betrayed themselves as possible illegal aliens by attempting to leave abruptly or flea altogether.
At the same time, however, those being targeted began to engage in all forms of resistance, both active and passive, which created hazards and other dangers. Those in the country illegally and their advocates and supporters made use of technology and modern forms of communication to coordinate that resistance. This resulted in federal officials, agents and employees countering those tactics with the application of technology and techniques of their own. Federal officials accused immigrants of violating the law in their efforts to elude capture. Federal agents were accused of skirting constitutional protections in their zeal to achieve deportation quotas.
By June 4, 2025 there were massive shows of public resistance to the raids, primarily in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. Huge public protests materialized in the areas where workplace arrests were taking place or near federal buildings. This complicated the function of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Initially, federal officials were baffled by the rapid turnout of crowds and interference in their operations, but within days they learned that those targeted for deportation enforcement were making use of a communication network to stay one step ahead of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (ICE) and the Border Patrol, consisting of social media platforms, apps, encrypted messaging, maps tracking federal agents’ locations. These digitized anti-detention programs, such as ICEBlock and the Rapid Response Network employed a succession of hotlines via phone numbers those in Southern California were able to call or text to report sightings of federal officers so that individual migrants could be signaled to leave or stay out of a specified area or building where raids were ongoing or about to take place. Similarly, the Mexican government created an app, ConsulAppContigo, to facilitate communications between Mexican citizens and Mexican consular officials to contact the family members of those taken into custody and arrange for their legal assistance.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams engaged in operations aimed at specific places and targets, such as workplaces employing large numbers of undocumented workers and in “roving raids” in which they patrolled the urban environment, on the lookout for individuals or groups of people who matched criteria associated with illegal aliens, making stops of them and taking them into custody if they could not offer documentation, proof, evidence or an indicator of U.S. citizenship.
According to civil libertarians and attorneys specializing in Fourth Amendment rights, such tactics skirted the U.S. Constitution, at least with regard to U.S. Citizens, whose rights are guaranteed under the Constitution, and in theory a violation of the rights of anyone in the country, whether they are here legally with visas or legal-residency-granting green cards or not.
The Trump Administration asserted, with some though not an overwhelming degree of evidence, that the resistance was organized and coordinated, aggressive and potentially or actually violent and dangerous. On June 7, over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Trump called upon the California National Guard to assist with maintaining order as crowds of protesters and resisters began throwing rocks, bricks and bottles at ICE agents and overturning vehicles in Los Angeles. Some 700 national guardsmen were dispatched to hotspots around Los Angeles.
After a degree of back and forth, President Trump relented, instead sending over 700 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms to specific locations in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties to “protect federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.”
Subsequently, with the spectacle of Marines on patrol in the nation’s second largest city sinking in on all concerned, the Marines 2nd Battalion was withdrawn and were replaced with 300 National Guardsmen.
Thereafter, the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center took up the cause of three immigrants, a single U.S. citizen and a dual U.S./Mexican citizen – Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto, Isaac Antonio Villegas Molina, Jason Brian Gavidia and Jorge Luis Hernandez Viramontes – who had been taken into custody by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May. United States District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in July 2025 granted a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol to prevent it from carrying out further raids based on Judge Frimpong’s conclusion that targeting individuals for questioning, detention or arrest relating to immigration law violation based on their place of work, their presence in a particular place, their ethnicity or race, the type of work they were engaged in and their language or accent was a violation of their constitutional rights. When the Trump Administration appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the panel consisting of justices Marsha Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald Gould upheld Judge Frimpong. Ultimately, however, the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal in September rejected in a 6-to-3 ruling the lower courts’ conclusions that federal officials were engaged in a “racist deportation scheme,” accepting the Trump Administration’s assertion that federal agents working in Southern California, where 71 percent of the illegal immigrants originated in Latin America, were not engaging in discriminatory behavior by considering the speaking of Spanish to be a criterion distinguishing undocumented aliens from the native population or concentrating their patrols in or around businesses which have a demonstrated prior history of employing or attracting individuals in the country illegally.
Similarly, challenges to the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement efforts around the country, most notably in Portland, Oregon, Chicago and Washington, D.C., while initially successful, faltered when they progressed to higher courts. Based upon its victories in the Perdomo and other cases, federal authorities found themselves at liberty to utilize the National Guard as a martial element in the immigration control program. At one point, the Trump Administration moved to send members of the California National Guard to quell civil disturbances relating to immigration enforcement in Oregon.
President Trump himself and senior members of his administration grew resentful of the unwillingness of local political and local law enforcement officials to assist in carrying out federal immigration policy. Especial indignation was reserved for both Bianco and Dicus, Republicans both, over how they had betrayed their commander-in-chief just as he was about to embark on what many believed would prove to be the signature undertaking of his second term in office. The need to rely on the National Guard and the U.S. military to ensure that the law could be applied in a civilian context, giving the president’s opponents and detractors to paint him and his team as engaging in a heavyhanded violation of civil liberties had stymied the president in delivering on a key commitment he had made during the 2024 election.
Caught between the negative publicity of calling upon the National Guard and the U.S. Military for the provision of security and back-up to the Department of Homeland Security in its domestic operations and the refusal of local law enforcement agencies in California to maintain order and a shield of protection around agents engaged in illegal alien apprehension operations to prevent protesters from interfering in arrests, federal agents took creative approaches to confronting those they were targeting for arrest to avoid confrontations that might decline into violence. One such tactic was to move in on those targets in locations or under circumstances where both those being taken into custody and any others present would be disinclined or ill-positioned to resist or interfere. One such setting was at courthouses, including in their parking lots, on the grounds immediately adjacent or in front of them or within them.
Unsurprisingly, advocates for undocumented aliens and others found this objectionable. A Department of Homeland Security policy put in place by the Barack Obama Administration in 2011 designated courthouses, schools, hospitals, and places of worship as “sensitive locations.” off-limits to ICE officers unless “special circumstances” applied and the agents first sought approval and committed to functioning with extreme care and discretion. The policy was reiterated and strengthened by the Joseph Biden Administration with a 2021 memorandum expanding locations off-limits to ICE and the Border Patrol to places where children gather, social service centers and disaster relief locations.
Well prior to the strategy of engaging in courthouse arrests emerging as a mainstay in the aftermath of the contretemps involving the National Guard, in the immediate aftermath of President Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement issue a directive to the effect that its agents are free to conduct civil enforcement actions in or near courthouses and other public facilities “when they have credible information that leads them to believe the targeted alien is or will be present at a specific location, and where such action is not precluded by laws imposed by the jurisdiction in which the civil immigration enforcement action will take place.”
Courthouse arrests were considered by some to be beyond the pall because those showing up for court hearings, whether criminal or civil in nature, are evincing an adherence to the spirit of obeying the rule of law and taking advantage of those honoring the American judicial system and the tradition of settling differences or living up to a promise to appear runs the risk of discouraging respect for the legal system in both those arrested and others.
In July 2025, California Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero offered a non-binding non-judicial opinion that arresting criminal suspects or those thought to be inviolation of the nation’s immigration laws while they are in the process of attending court would likely have a “chilling effect” on those seeking justice or discourage immigrants in the country from adhering to the law. “Making courthouses a focus of immigration enforcement hinders, rather than helps, the administration of justice by deterring witnesses and victims from coming forward and discouraging individuals from asserting their rights,” Guerrero said.
In Rancho Cucamonga, the West Valley Justice Center, also known as the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse, is adjacent to Rancho Cucamonga City Hall. The West Valley Justice Center, since the shuttering of the Chino Courthouse in 2013, is the westernmost venue for the San Bernardino County Superior Court. Last year, in accordance with an executive order issued by President Trump that ICE agents should use their own discretion in how they go about effectuating arrests of those in the country illegally as part of the deportation process, routinely began staking out the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse, effectuating the arrests of those suspected of being in violation of the Smith Act.
Late last year, on December 3, 2025, a woman who identified herself as Rancho Cucamonga resident J.A. Anton who was in attendance at that evening’s Rancho Cucamonga City Council meeting, addressed city leaders, stating that agents with the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested 21 individuals who were attempting make appearances in court or who had already made them at the West Valley Detention Center.
“I would argue that allowing 21 people to be abducted by ICE in the court parking lot as they attend court hearings as they engage in due process is not providing for the community, it’s not ensuring and advancing the quality of life and it sure as hell is not inclusive decision-making.”
Anton said her city had the option of preventing such arrests from occurring, given that the courthouse lies within the city. She encouraged the city council to withdraw the welcome mat that had been extended to the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“You can designate Rancho [Cucamonga] as a sanctuary city. You can pass policies to limit local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. You can ensure undocumented immigrants have access to local services such as healthcare, education and legal services. You can join lawsuits challenging federal policies. You could enforce SB 54, passed in 2017 and upheld recently in 2025. It prohibits state and local law enforcement from using resources to investigate or detain or arrest individuals based on immigration status. And finally, you can hold public hearings and require transparency from businesses and courts like the one right across the street from here where we know ICE sits in the parking lot from 8 til 4, waiting for people to come out of their hearings so they can stop them and take them. They engage in dangerous maneuvers in this parking lot and on the streets. We have heard nothing from our designated officials who claim to uphold values and protect the community. I would urge you to do something. At the very least make a statement condemning the targeting of your community members.
Also addressing the city council that night was a woman who identified herself simply as “Jess.” She said, “There have been several instances where DHS [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] have targeted individuals leaving the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse. Twenty-one families have been ripped apart. I’m sure you are all aware of our Constitution that guarantees the right to due process for all persons. In case you are not, being targeted outside the courthouse constitutes a violation of due process. I’ve personally witnessed countless abductions taking place, leaving behind shattered car windows and broken hearts. Do you have any idea what to tell someone who has a family member kidnapped right in front of them? Do you even care? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in this community as an undocumented person? What are you going to do to protect our day laborers at our Home Depot? They are being harassed day in and day out by local law enforcement, by property management. They’re being arrested and unjustly arrested. Community members are being arrested for videotaping these unjust arrests and nobody has heard a peep out of any of you on how to help these community members. They are just looking for work, just like the rest of us. I’m sorely disappointed with the inaction and the silence from our city council on what is happening.”
Those operations at the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse and at other in San Bernardino County continued.
In January, Eloise Gómez Reyes, a Colton native, Democrat. attorney and former Assemblywoman elected to the California Senate in 2024, introduced Senate Bill 873, which was framed to restrict federal immigration agent arrests making arrests at state courthouses. It requires law enforcement to present a judicial warrant, identify themselves, and state their purpose, while allowing individuals subjected to unlawful civil arrests at courts to sue for damages, including a specified $10,000 in statutory damages as well as equitable relief, declaratory relief, and damages.
Senate Bill 873 requires that federal agents entering a California state courthouse with the intent of making an arrest identify themselves to uniformed personnel, state their purpose, and present a valid judicial warrant rather than an administrative warrant. The bill would also prevent federal officers from making immigration law violation arrests within 1,000 feet of a state courthouse. It further requires that the California Judicial Council is required to collect and publish annual data on law enforcement activities at courthouses.
Gómez Reyes said her intent with Senate Bill 873 is to “protect individuals traveling to, attending or leaving court proceedings for lawful purposes” and “provide legal assurances that Californians are safe from immigration agents in and around the grounds of a courthouse.”
This year, Bianco is vying for governor and Dicus is seeking reelection as sheriff. As it turns out, because of a logjam of Democrats seeking to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor and California’s open primary system in which the top two finishers in the June primary qualify for the November run-off, Bianco finds himself in an enviable but yet delicate position. The slate of Democratic candidates who are to appear on the June ballot in the governor’s race, which includes two former members of Congress, another former member of Congress who was also California attorney general and the U.S. secretary of human and health services, the current California superintendent of public instruction, the current mayor of San Jose, the former mayor of Los Angeles, the former state controller, a wealthy entrepreneur and scientist as well as six businessmen, a businesswoman, three educators, a civil rights attorney and an immigrant advocate. With nineteen Democrats dividing their party’s vote, no single one at present has captured more than 13 percent of the total vote in pre-election polling. Bianco and another well-known Republican, Steve Hilton, a British-born former advisor to Conservative-party prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron who emigrated to the United States to become a naturalized U.S. citizen and Fox News host, have scratched their way to the top of a heap above ten far-lesser-known Republican candidates, with Hilton register 16 to 17 percent in the pre-election polls and Bianco coming in at 14 percent. President Trump, who is yet miffed with Bianco for his refusal to have his department assist with Operation Alta California, endorsed Hilton earlier this month.
Dicus, who in San Bernardino County is backed by the same political machine that was created by Sheriff Frank Bland, who served 28 years in office from 1955 until 1983 and which has sustained the six sheriffs who succeeded him in the county’s highest ranking law enforcement office in the more than 43 years since then, is being challenged for reelection by Joe Silva, a former Fresno County sheriff’s deputy.
While Dicus is the odd-on favorite to outpoll Silva and gain reelection in June, like his law enforcement colleague and friend, Bianco, the decision he made last year to undercut the Trump Administration with regard to facilitating Operation Alta California has deprived him of the endorsement in this year’s election he would have otherwise received from President Trump. Indeed, while Trump has not yet endorsed Silva, were Silva to declare that upon moving into the sheriff’s post he would place federal law enforcement priorities above those of the state and defy Senate Bill 54/the California Values Act/California Sanctuary Law by putting San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies at the disposal of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Border patrol in the effort to root out illegal aliens, Trump would most assuredly endorse him in the same way he endorsed Hilton.
Accordingly, both Bianco and Dicus have sought to make amends with the Trump Administration.
Bianco has gone out of his way to state that he is strongly opposed to Senate Bill 873, criticizing Gómez Reyes’ proposed legislation as creating public policy that would restrict law enforcement’s ability to protect the public, “tie the hands” of citizens, and “coddle criminals.”
Dicus as well has enunciated his opposition to Senate Bill 873, asserting it will etch into stone a law that is unconstitutional and which will bring about a no-win situation for local law enforcement.
Dicus made his opposition clear in a March 26 letter to Gómez Reyes.
“On behalf of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, I write in strong opposition to SB 873,” the letter states. “While framed as a measure to protect access to the courts, this bill goes far beyond that purpose and instead attempts to regulate federal law enforcement activity, exposes counties to significant liability, and places sheriff’s deputies in an untenable position that creates direct conflict with federal law and exposes them to potential civil liabilities on one hand and allegations of interference with federal officers on the other.”
Dicus offered his assessment that “SB 873 is not an administrative refinement. It is a substantive expansion of state authority into an area where the Constitution is clear: the State of California may not control, condition or impede the execution of federal law.”
According to Dicus, “SB 873 creates a dangerous and immediate operational conflict for sheriff’s deputies assigned to courthouse security. Sheriffs are legally required to provide security at courthouse facilities per Gov Code § 69921.5. Deputies are stationed at entrances, hallways, and surrounding areas, and are responsible for maintaining order and enforcing court directives. Under SB873, those same deputies would be expected to:
* Evaluate federal enforcement actions against state law requirements
* Demand compliance with a state-defined “judicial warrant” standard
* Delay, deny, or otherwise intervene in federal arrest activity occurring in or around courthouse.”
According to Dicus, “In practice SB 873 forces deputies into a binary choice:
* Intervene and attempt to stop or delay a federal officer, thereby risking allegations of interfering with or impeding a federal officer in violation of federal law, including 18 U.S.C. § 111; or
* Decline to intervene, and face exposure to civil liability under SB 873, including statutory damages and attorney’s fees.”
On April 9, there was a substantial media presence, including cameramen and a reporter with ABC News and a reporter and photographer with the Los Angeles Times at the West Valley Justice Center in Rancho Cucamonga. They captured images, moving and still, of at least nine federal agents staking out the courthouse that morning, as well as the somewhat brutal takedown of one man who was in the country illegally and the arrest of two others.
The task force may have collared as many as seven individuals that morning, most as they were leaving the building.
In a break from ICE policy of restricting what information about the department’s operation, the department released publicly the names and nationalities of three of those taken into custody on April 9, perhaps because their arrests had been captured on video or in photos.
Most of the agents involved in the immigration enforcement action wore masks or gaiters, which partially obscured their faces.
Those arrested were identified as Godofredo Chiquete Lopez of Mexico and Alexander Pacheco Sabogal and Cesar Andres Mendez Garzon, both of Colombia.
According to ICE, Lopez came into the country legally on a tourist visa in 2007, but did not leave after its expiration and was subsequently arrested on two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon other than a firearm, a misdemeanor count of hit and run and inflicting great bodily injury on an individual he assaulted. He was making a court appearance with regard to having been criminally charged on those matters when he was arrested. He has entered not guilty pleas on all of the charges against him.
Sabogal was charged, according to the Department of Homeland Security, with battery. When he was formally charged with that crime in 2023, according to federal officials, he failed to appear for trial and an order for his removal from the country was issued by an immigration judge during the time when President Biden was in office. No one with the name Sabogal name was on the court docket for April 9, however, and indication Sabogal was using an alias.
Garzon who apparently entered the United States illegally in Arizona in in 2023, was previously identified as an unauthorized alien in the country and was directed to be removed by an order handed down by an immigration judge last year. Garzon, like Sabogal, was not listed as a defendant or litigant in any hearings at the Rancho Cucamonga Courthouse on April 9 and is not charged with any crimes in San Bernardino County. A Homeland Security spokesman told the Sentinel that many undocumented immigrants make use of multiple identities and aliases, with some consistently utilizing one identity while they are in a specific location or holding a specific job and often discarding a previously used identity upon changing residences.
The spokesman said “greater cooperation and engagement by state and local law enforcement” with federal officers “is needed” and that the combined missions of the Department of Homeland Security, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department and the Border patrol are being hampered by “elected officials who put their own constituents in danger by refusing to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security. They are wasting federal officers’ time, energy and resources by allowing criminals who are undocumented and therefore very difficult to track to remain free.”
Because local law enforcement decision-makers such as Dicus and Bianco have directed their departments to not cooperate and coordinate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department at the time arrests are made, the spokesman said, federal agents must independently determine which individuals among the massive volumes of those arrested are and are not American citizens, entailing a substantial amount of manpower and time be devoted to determining whom federal agents are going to focus their resources on. Moreover, he said, this requires that the agents confront those undocumented aliens at the courthouse because in many cases their whereabouts are unknown and their scheduled court appearances entail the one conjunction of time and place when and at which they can be reliably located.
The federal government, the spokesman said, is not going to give up on its commitment to apprehend and deport as many foreign nationals who are in the country illegally as can be located, irrespective of whether state and local officials support that initiative.
Richard Hernandez reporting from Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Virginia, San Bernardino and Los Angeles. Mark Gutglueck reporting from Sacramento.