San Diego County supervisors voted 3-2 on Tuesday to end contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to train at a county-owned facility near the Mexican border and a Navy facility leased by the county. The agencies that conduct immigration enforcement and run customs and immigration checks on the busy U.S.-Mexico border have had contracts for years to train at the facilities.
“Federal immigration agents have harmed our communities many different ways here locally and throughout the nation,” said Monica Montgomery Steppe, one of the supervisors who voted to end the contracts. “We just don’t want to be complicit in that.”
No, ICE and CBP are separate agencies, they just both happen to be appallingly racist (even by the standards of US law enforcement). The county board successfully forced the sheriff to ban ICE agents, but in response to that she went out of her way to hold a press conference to tell the board they better not try to ban CBP agents too or else, which is probably more just deeply annoying to me than it is actually consequential at this point, but could turn into a lawsuit if the county does try to ban CBP I’d suppose.
I suppose if San Diego County supervisors wanted to go nuclear, they could close the entire training facility, then contract with another facility only for county sheriffs. This way the county would still be providing facilities for sheriffs, but the sheriffs would have no control over who else would be let in.