With the close of 2025 approaching and after that the one-year mark of the Second Donald Trump Presidency, cities and local public officials in San Bernardino County continue to buck the trend among well over 100 cities throughout California that have proven hostile to the stepped-up federal immigration law enforcement.
Perhaps the major hallmark of Donald Trump’s second go-round as the nation’s chief executive has been the green light he has given the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, the Department of Enforcement, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Labor in preventing those from other countries coming into the Unitied States without visas, work permits or being registered along with efforts to rounding up the more than 20 million illegal aliens already in the country. The administration’s stated goal is to deport as many of those 20 million as possible by the end of Trump’s current four-year term, to include as many of the 2.2 million undocumented aliens estimated to be in California.
On September 23, the Department of Homeland Security announced that in the eight months between Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration and September 20, two million illegal aliens had been removed from the country or had self-deported. Based on that statistic, the immigration enforcement effort was on a trajectory to deport 12 million by January 2029, when Trump is scheduled to leave office. That projection, however, is based on the limitations on manpower and assets devoted to immigration enforcement that were in place when the current administration began. Since January, the federal government has beefed up the assets utilized by those various agencies in the mission to round up those in the country illegally. Moreover, the federal government late last spring initiated a recruitment effort to increase the number of Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE], Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Department of Enforcement agents. Based on the expansion in the number of agents and the federal government’s overall enforcement capability, together with evolving detection and apprehension tactics, it is anticipated that 80 percent of President Trump’s stated goal of removing 20 million illegal aliens from the country will be achieved during his second term in office.
A precept of the Trump Administration is that anyone who engages in a violation of the nation’s immigration law is by definition a criminal. It further presumes that a substantial number, perhaps even a majority of the undocumented in the country are making use of social benefits to which they are not entitled, detracting from those available to American citizens.
The vast majority of the president’s political opponents either do not consider the failure of foreign nationals to register their presence in the United States to be a crime or believe it to be a de minimus offense that does not merit an enforcement effort. They are adamantly opposed to the federal government’s enforcement of immigration law against anyone who does not qualify as a “violent offender.”
Several California’s cities, including its larger ones such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, and Sacramento have actively resisted the Trump Administration’s immigration policies by filing lawsuits challenging federal action with regard to immigration law enforcement. They have declared themselves “sanctuary jurisdictions,” passed local protective ordinances and organized, allowed and encouraged large-scale protests against immigration raids to take place. In addition, some of the state’s major political leaders, including Governor Gavin Newsom, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have led, inspired or sponsored administrative, legislative and legal efforts to shield residents from aggressive federal enforcement action.
The American Civil Liberty Union and Public Counsel in July filed suit against Department of Homeland Security Director, the Department of Homeland Security and multiple federal agecies and offices on behalf of Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Carlos Alexander Osorto, Isaac Antonio Villegas Molina, Jason Brian Gavidia and Jorge Luis Hernandez Viramontes which alleged the plaintiffs’ rights were being violated by the Deparment of Homeland Security, ICE, the U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Office of Enforcment and Security when they conducted roving patrols and then detained those who appeared to fit the profile of an unregistered migrant. In addition to the alleged racial profiling, the suit asserted those arrested were being denied counsel during and in the aftermath of the large-scale raids. Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto orchestrated Los Angeles’s filing of a motion to support the plaintiffs in the Perdom v. Noem case as did the cities of Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pico Rivera, Montebello, Monterey Park and West Hollywood.
Both U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong and a 9th Circuit Court panel accepted the ACLU/Public Counsel assertion that the federal government was involved in a “racist deportation scheme” and ordered that the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies and employees discontinue activities based on race, language, location, or job type. The Supreme Court, however, in dual 6-3 decisions, first temporarily stayed that order and then reversed it entirely, allowing ICE to use those factors plus others to form the basis for reasonable suspicion, effectively allowing the federal action, including raids against groups of people and individual arrests to proceed. Both dissenting justices, civil rights groups and the leadership of over 120 California cities disagreed, seeing the decision as undermining Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. They remain, under the law, powerless to controvert the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, and the raids have continued, though less spiritedly in recent months as the Department of Homeland Security’s primary focus has been in other states and locations than California, including Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Rochester, New York; Albuquerque; Boston; New Orleans; Jersey City, New Jersey; Hoboken, New Jersey; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; Denver; Paterson, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Newark, New Jersey; East Lansing, Michigan; and various places in Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, Vermont, Rhode Island and Nevada.
The presence of federal agents in Southern California has continued, but operations have not been maintained at the consistently intense levels that were evident, particularly in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County during the summer.
San Bernardino County has been for decades a Republican stronghold and remains, despite the Democratic Party having seized virtual total political control of California, one of a mere five bastions of Republicanism in the 39.43 million-population, 163,396-square mile-Golden State.
In California, all of the constitutional state offices from governor to lieutenant governor to attorney general to secretary of state to superintendent of public instruction to insurance commissioner to state controller in California are occupied by Democrats. In the state’s lower legislative house, the California Assembly, 60 of 80  members are Democrats. In the upper house, the California Senate, 30 of 40 members are Democrats. In California’s Congressional Delegation, both Senators are Democrats and of the state 52 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 43 are Democrats and nine are Republicans. Yet, in San Bernardino County, which is just one of California’s 58 counties, Republicans hold the upper hand politically. While five of its eight state senators are Democrats, that is because large portions of three of those districts lie in neighboring counties dominated by the Democrats. Five of the district’s ten assembly members are Republicans. Two of the district’s four members of Congress are Republicans. In seventeen of the county’s 22 cities and two incorporated towns, Republicans hold a majority of the council seats. Four of the five members of the county board of supervisors are Republicans.
Those ratios are reflected in the attitude the county’s municipal leaders have toward the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts. In contrast to the way in which other governmental jurisdictions have sought to lay stumbling blocks in the paths of the Department of Homeland Security and agents with the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol or the U.S. Office of Enforcement and Security, city officials in San Bernardino County, with only minor exceptions, have essentially just tried to stay out the way of the federal government over the least ten months.
Local law enforcement agencies are impacted by state laws like SB 54, which prohibits them from actively assisting federal agents during their operations or themselves engaging in immigration law enforcement. In San Bernardino County’s 22 cities and two incorporated towns, ten of the cities have their own municipal police departments and 14 contract with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement service.
Statistically throughout California, 73 percent of the estimated 2.2 million unregistered foreigners are Hispanic and 62 percent are from Mexico. Thus, an estimated 62 percent of the illegal aliens in California at the beginning of 2025 who were targeted for removal by the Trump Administration are Mexican citizens.
In San Bernardino County overall, 54.2 percent of the population is Hispanic. Prior to the onset of the second Trump administration’s immigration enforcement program, there were in San Bernardino County an estimated 127,681 undocumented aliens, or slightly more than one out of every 18 people residing in the county. Both the number of actual undocumented aliens and the number of Latinos in the county generally and in its political subdivisions as well as the consideration that a significant percentage of the region’s citizens/legal residents are descendants of Mexicans shaped in some measure the collective attitude toward immigration, illegal immigration, the concentration of illegal immigrants in San Bernardino County’s communities and the federal immigration enforcement effort being conducted by the Trump Administration.
The concentration of Hispanics in a given political subdivision of San Bernardino County has had a bearing on whether the law enforcement agencies in those particular areas have used the discretionary room in the law to cooperate with federal authorities regarding immigration enforcement. For example, there is no specific restriction on a local law enforcement officer in California preventing an “inquiry” from being made with a federal agency with regard to the citizenship or immigration status of an individual who has been arrested by a local agency and is yet in custody.
In the eight municipalities in San Bernardino County with the slimmest percentage of Latino residents – Big Bear Lake where 24.58 percent of the population is Hispanic; Yucca Valley with a 25 percent Latino population; Twentynine Palms with 25.8 percent; Loma Linda with 27.9 percent; Chino Hills with 28.5 percent; Needles with 30.27 percent; Yucaipa with 34.4 percent and Rancho Cucamonga with 37.4 percent – the sheriff’s department serves as the police department. In those places, the deputies and detectives with the department feel less restricted with regard to involving the Department of Homeland Security after the fact when an individual who has been arrested, particularly on suspicion of committing a crime of violence. Of the ten county cities which have a municipal police department, Redlands has the lowest percentage of Latino residents at 37.6 percent. Officers there feel at liberty to consult with federal authorities when dealing with a suspect whose nationality is other than American. That applies as well for sheriff’s department personnel in Apple Valley, where 38.5 percent of the population is Latino.
In the rest of the county’s cities, Hispanic residents comprise more than 40 percent of those living within their individual municipal limits.
Thus, it is considered politically risky to coordinate with the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or any federal authorities when dealing with criminals or criminal suspects in Barstow, where 44.4 percent of those living there are Latino; in Upland, where 44.5 percent of the population is Hispanic; in Grand Terrace, where Hispanics comprise 47.9 percent of the population; in Chino, where 53.18 percent of city residents are Latino; in Victorville, where 55.4 percent are Latino; and in both Hesperia and Highland, where 55.5 percent of their populations are Hispanic.
Among the law enforcement officers who work with the sheriff’s department as part of the contract police department in Adelanto, where 63.5 percent of those living in that city claim Latino Heritage, and the members of the force in the municipal police departments in Fontana, Ontario, San Bernardino, Montclair, Colton and Rialto, where the Hispanic population registers as 67.87 percent, 69 percent, 69.6 percent, 71.9 percent, 73.8 percent and 74.4 percent, respectively, contacting federal authorities with regard to the immigration status of criminal suspect would be considered, if not an act of career suicide, the expression of a professional death wish.
The police departments, including the ten municipal ones and those sheriff’s stations or substations which serve in a contract capacity with the 14 other cities, are answerable, or their police chiefs or station commanders are answerable, to the city or town councils that employ them. Each city or town has an actual or implied policy.
In San Bernardino, the policy isn’t a unified one, as there is a wide divergence on the city council, including one who is a member of the Republican Central Committee and two others who are entrenched in the county’s Democratic establishment, with a mix of attitudes between those two polar opposites. Pushing the department in one direction are state laws such as SB 54, community activists who were pushing San Bernardino to declare itself a sanctuary city and religious fervor. San Bernardino is the seat of the San Bernardino Diocese. Bishop Alberto Rojas, a Mexican-born prelate of the Catholic Church, has served as the head of the San Bernardino Diocese since 2020. He has blasted the U.S. federal government for its anti-immigrant tactics and has granted dispensations to those in the diocese to miss Mass to thwart federal agents staking out churches to arrest the faithful on Sundays as they arrive or depart from church. While some on the city council are aligned with Bishop Rojas, the council did not muster enough votes to declare San Bernardino a sanctuary city. While San Bernardino Police are prohibited from assisting ICE, its officers have not been directed by Chief Darren Goodman to inhibit or stop federal agents from carrying out their mission.
Victorville, despite hosting large numbers of illegal aliens within its confines, has not taken a stand against immigration enforcement. Subject to SB 54, deputies and detectives in Victorvill have limited their cooperation with federal officials to what is laid out in the letter of the law, but in areas pertaining to normal operations where serious crime has been a local reality and of some sensitivity to the community, in specific cases involving foreign-born unregistered residents discovered to be engaged in the commission of crimes, sheriff’s department personnel have coordinated with federal authorities, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a few known instances, those arrested have not been prosecuted by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office but surrendered to federal authorities, who processed the offenders and deported them. The sheriff’s department in Victorville taken not action to impede federal authorities, who in some case have acted with proper warrants and in some other cases did so under circumstances in which they did not appear to have warrants before initiating raids. A local politician, Assemblyman Juan Carrillo, has opposed federal immigration enforcement as “disruptive” to the community. Carrillo, who has an office in Victorville, put out a statement earlier this year entitled “ICE in the Victor Valley Region,” which said, “I strongly oppose the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeting immigrant communities in the Victor Valley region. These actions are not only disruptive and harmful, they are inhumane.” Carrillo’s statements had no appreciable impact on the sheriff’s department’s comportment.
The Chino Police Department, like other local law enforcement agencies, has a policy of adhering to SB 54, limiting its cooperation and coordination with federal immigration enforcement. While it has not, on record, participated in ICE raids, it has sent its officers in response to citizen reaction to the raids.
Though California has laws, some of them newly enacted like SB 805 requiring ICE agents to clearly identify themselves and AB 49 and SB 81 and SB 98 restricting ICE from interfering with school operations and healthcare facilities, San Bernardino county law enforcement agencies have not grown confrontational with federal authorities when county residents and advocates for undocumented aliens have referenced instances where those laws were violated by federal agents.
San Bernardino County’s civil and civic authorities have been less than anxious to accommodate residents who have called upon them to oppose federal agencies in their enforcement of of immigration law.
In Chino Hills, the city council some time ago became inured of calls by citizens for the city to get involved in issues beyond its immediate authority, such as when it was called upon to make a resolution opposing Israel’s action in the Gaza Strip. It has similarly disregarded calls by activists to take a stand against federal immigration enforcement.
At the specially-called meeting of the Fontana City Council on November 12, a handful of city residents sought to push the council into taking a public stand in opposition to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. When they began to address the city council during that portion of the meeting set aside for public comment, they were shot down at once by Mayor Acquanetta Warren and City Atttorney Ruben Duran.
Warren, considered one of San Bernardino County’s leading Republican figures, is a Donald Trump acolyte, who showed herself to be in no mood to put up with claptrap from a coterie of Democrats intent on badmouthing the president and railing against his domestic policy, immigration enforcement in particular.
Warren seized on the consideration that the meeting was a specially-called one at which the topics were to be limited to what was on the agenda. The matter being discussed that evening were arrangements for the city’s Toys for Tots Classic Car Show and an accompanying toy drive to support the Fontana Boys and Girls Club. When one of the speakers made a maneuver around the restrictions to note that those who wanted to participate in the car show and toy drive wanted some assurance that they would be safe from arrest during those festivities and sought an assurance that they would not be subject to “terror,” the mayor took the position that her “public comment does not relate to that” and that if she persisted “You will not be allowed to speak.” The speaker once again digressed toward the issue of federal agents being on hand at the car show, at which point Warren interrupted her once more.
“This has nothing to do with the agenda item.” Warren said. “Do not talk out, or we will ask you to leave.” When the resident again mentioned ICE, and sought to relate what might happen during the upcoming car show by stating, “Parents were just taken over the weekend. I want the children to feel safe,” Warren settled the developing argument in her own favor by cutting the microphone off and having the woman removed from the meeting chamber.
After the meeting, Warren justified her actions in a public statement.
“Under state law, Special Meetings allow public comment only on the items listed on the agenda and this was clearly explained prior to public comment,” Warren wrote. “While we value every member of the public and their voices, several speakers attempted to address federal issues not related to the agenda item. They were respectfully reminded to keep their comments focused on the single topic before the council. Fontana remains committed to transparency, following public meeting laws and supporting events that uplift our community.”
In Rancho Cucamonga, elected city officials give their residents an opportunity to speak their piece.
A woman, identified as Rancho Cucamonga resident J.A. Anton, who addressed the Rancho Cucamonga City Council on December 3 said, “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 the city had options to, which extended to withdrawing a welcome mat to ICE.
“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.
A woman identified simply as Jess addressed the council, saying “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.
The Rancho Cucamonga City Council took no action at its December 3 meeting with regard to the comments from J.A. Alton or Jess, and scheduled no action relating to them at its December 17 meeting.