Why this matters
Amid increasingly tense standoffs with masked ICE agents nationwide, San Diego County supervisors are moving to further restrict the sheriff’s interactions with federal immigration agents. The sheriff hasn't followed their first policy.
Melissa Hernandez said she knew something was wrong when the answers at the jail window started changing.
It was the second week of President Donald Trump’s second term — and her nephew, Cosme Koutalou, a Cuban citizen she says had lived in the U.S. for 15 years, was being held at the San Diego County jail on a probation violation after getting out on a felony weapons possession charge.
When Hernandez and others went to the downtown San Diego building to bring him home, the staff said he would be released soon, she said. So they waited.
Then two armed, uniformed Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents appeared in the waiting room. They said they were there to pick up Cosme.
“I’m his aunt,” Hernandez said. “What as the family, what are we supposed to do?”
“You can’t do anything, I’m sorry,” one agent told her. He was being taken into immigration custody.
“With this mandate with the president, they are doing all sorts of things,” one agent said.
“There were priorities before, but right now they are taking everybody.”
A video recorded by Hernandez and provided to inewsource shows her entire interaction with the agents. They are unmasked, answer her questions and explain what the family can expect.
The video shows something else striking: the first of at least 10 times in 2025 when the San Diego County Sheriff’s office violated a county supervisors’ policy requiring a judicial warrant for such detentions by transferring someone into ICE custody without one. In three of the cases, the ICE detainer was approved before the county policy passed, but the transfer occurred after.
The supervisors passed their policy in December 2024 to prevent county resources from being used in Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign. At the time, Sheriff Kelly Martinez said she wouldn’t cooperate with the policy, and her vow to ignore it received national attention.
Public records obtained by inewsource show the policy didn’t pressure Martinez to change her mind – and that the supervisors didn’t force her to comply. There is no indication the standoff will end anytime soon. Instead, the supervisors are about to double down with a new policy.
And the stakes are high. Increasingly tense standoffs with masked ICE agents nationwide, which have been marred by physical confrontations and smashed vehicle windows, escalated recently to the fatal shooting in Minnesota of 37-year-old U.S. citizen Renee Good.
The violent clashes across the country stand in stark contrast to the San Diego video, which shows agents being patient, polite, even personable, with one agent telling Hernandez, “I’m so sorry about your situation, I know it sucks for a lot of people,” and the other at another point saying, “it’s not fun for us either.”
President Trump said in a speech this month in Detroit that on Feb. 1 the U.S. government would stop “making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens, and it breeds fraud and crime.” San Diego County is a sanctuary county.
The administration has said limiting cooperation with federal agents forces them to resort to the aggressive street-level enforcement that has led to widespread protests in sanctuary cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, all which have policies similar to San Diego County’s.
In April, Trump issued an executive order that directed federal agencies to identify ways to cut funding and bring legal actions against sanctuary jurisdictions like San Diego County that attempt to limit the U.S. government’s role in apprehending immigrants in the country illegally.
In August, the Justice Department placed San Diego County and three other sanctuary counties on a list whose policies that Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to “eradicate,” saying they “impede law enforcement and put American citizens at risk.”
ICE data show that ICE requests for transfer increasingly target people without any criminal convictions or charges in San Diego.
Supporters of sanctuary policies say they build trust and safety in communities by treating residents with respect. They say police participation in immigration enforcement makes immigrant communities increasingly unlikely to call the police to report crimes in their neighborhoods.
The records obtained by inewsource show Sheriff Martinez has continued to cooperate with ICE to transfer people with serious criminal backgrounds without requiring a judicial warrant even though immigration attorneys and advocates say the practice conflicts with a state law that bars cooperating with federal immigration authorities when it conflicts with “local law, or local policy.”
It may take a court to settle the dispute between elected supervisors and an elected sheriff.
That could take years. A spokesperson for the county declined to speculate on potential future legal actions. Meanwhile, ICE is using the local jail system to find people to deport.
Despite local efforts to curtail the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on illegal immigration, an inewsource review of ICE data, court records and county jail records found ICE has used county jails as a way to find targets for enforcement.
When someone is arrested, their fingerprints are run through federal databases and the secure communities system which will automatically alert ICE if there are records indicating that person is removable. Often, this is because of a prior deportation but people also end up in the secure communities database from a previous detention by ICE or Border Patrol, being processed at the border or having applied legally for some kind of visa or immigration benefit. Once ICE is aware someone is in custody, they can get a judicial warrant. Then, local laws cannot prevent a person’s transfer to ICE, and any law enforcement agency that checks will see that arrest warrant and can make an arrest. It also makes it easier for ICE to make an arrest.
Behind the dispute
Both Sheriff Martinez and County Board of Supervisors Chair Terra Lawson-Remer declined interview requests for this story. Lawson-Remer did not answer several specific questions emailed to her office about the sheriff’s disregard of the supervisors’ policy and how the county might enforce it.
Erin Grassi, associate director of the community organization Alliance San Diego, said the sheriff’s transfers are illegal every time deputies don’t require ICE to have a judicial warrant.
“They’re ignoring due process entirely,” Grassi said.
“As an elected leader in law enforcement, you have a responsibility to uphold state and local law, and you have a responsibility to build trust with the entire community, which includes people who may or may not have been born here.”
In California, a state law known as the Values Act passed during the first Trump administration prevents law enforcement from cooperating with ICE when they detain people who haven’t committed serious crimes and bars state and local resources from being used in immigration enforcement. It also allows local jurisdictions to pass additional policies limiting cooperation.
California’s Values Act — Senate Bill 54 — has limited when state and local law enforcement agencies can cooperate with federal immigration authorities since 2018. It was upheld by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019. Under the law, officers generally cannot notify ICE about a person’s release or assist in the transfer of someone to immigration custody unless the individual has certain “qualifying charges” or convictions. Qualifying charges usually involve serious or violent felonies—offenses such as murder, rape, robbery or major assaults. SB 54 also includes additional crimes that trigger cooperation, like felony DUI causing injury, certain firearm offenses, felony domestic violence and crimes requiring sex-offender registration. In some cases, older felony convictions or repeated specified misdemeanors may also qualify. If a person is charged with or convicted of any of these listed offenses, local agencies are permitted—but not required—to provide information or assistance to ICE. Without a qualifying offense or a judicial warrant, SB 54 prohibits immigration enforcement cooperation. In San Diego County, there are no qualifying charges and a judicial warrant is required for cooperation.
Of the 48 people transferred to ICE custody from San Diego County jails between January and August of this year, 10 were transferred without a judicial warrant in violation of county policy, an inewsource analysis of documents obtained through a public records request found.
Twenty-two of those people were transferred on judicial warrants after the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office rejected the ICE detainers because they hadn’t committed a serious enough crime to qualify for transfer under the original Values Act protections, which the sheriff has continued to follow.
In 2024, there were 30 transfers, 11 of which were done with judicial warrants.
A spokesperson for Sheriff Martinez sent inewsource a statement when declining an interview.
“The Board of Supervisors does not set policy for the Sheriff’s Office,” the statement said. “The Sheriff, as an independently elected official, sets the policy for the Sheriff’s Office. California law prohibits the Board of Supervisors from interfering with the independent, constitutionally and statutorily designated investigative functions of the Sheriff, and is clear that the Sheriff has the sole and exclusive authority to operate the county jails.”
Supervisor Lawson-Remer also had a spokesperson send inewsource a statement. “There is no doubt that ICE’s actions are making our communities less safe here in San Diego County and across the country. This kind of federal overreach is deeply alarming. No one should be handed over to a lawless federal agency without a judicial warrant and due process.”
In declining her interview request, Lawson-Remer didn’t answer emailed questions about what the county might do to enforce the policy, whether the sheriff was breaking the law and what residents can expect from additional sanctuary laws if existing ones are not being followed.
Even though the sheriff is not complying with its earlier policy, the county board of supervisors is one vote away from doubling down on restricting federal immigration enforcement locally.
The board will reconvene on Jan. 28 to vote on a new ordinance authored by Lawson-Remer. A majority of supervisors gave the measure preliminary approval on Jan. 13 after Lawson-Remer invoked the killing of Renee Good in urging its passage.
The new policy would restrict access by federal agents to non-public areas at county facilities without a warrant or court order. The policy also requires the sheriff to make public an incident report within three business days of responding to a call for service related to federal immigration activity with the names of the agencies involved, whether a judicial warrant was presented to the sheriff and personnel details such as badge numbers and agency designations.
Ian Seruelo, an immigration attorney and chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, an organization that helped advocate for the supervisors’ initial policy, said the board could try to enforce it by threatening to reduce the sheriff’s budget or file a lawsuit against the department. Seruelo also said the board could simply ask the sheriff to attend a public supervisors meeting and answer questions about her approach.
Another level of enforcement could come from the California Attorney General.
When inewsource contacted the Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office with questions about the dispute between the sheriff and county supervisors, a spokesperson said they don’t provide legal advice or analysis.
Instead, the aide shared an official bulletin describing law enforcement’s responsibilities in immigration enforcement. It says that law enforcement must comply with local policies that are more restrictive than the Values Act.
César García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University who has written three books on criminal justice and immigration, said such sanctuary policies help, instead of hinder, police.
“Lots of law enforcement officers are quite reluctant to work hand in hand with ICE for the simple reason that they need good relationships with the people who live in their communities if they are going to successfully keep those communities safe,” he said.
“When people start to fear that their loved ones and their neighbors or themselves may be disappeared into the immigration detention and deportation pipeline by any kind of interaction, big or small with the local police, then people become very reluctant to interact with the local police.”
Nationally, ICE data show that law enforcement cooperation has become a key way of getting immigrants into custody for deportation. Nearly half of arrests nationally have occurred in local jails and other lockups, according to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative.
ICE use of local law enforcement as a way of identifying people for later enforcement isn’t limited to California. The Marshall Project identified cases across the country in which an interaction with police led to a later arrest by ICE.
“Really dangerous” people obviously “do not belong in our streets,” Seruelo said.
But, he said no matter what, due process must be followed in the United States.
San Diego County’s policy of requiring judicial warrants ensures that happens and that the government has other tools for enforcement besides warrantless jail transfers, he said.
“What is important is that they continue to respect civil rights.”
