Despite a policy designed to limit them, transfers from San Diego County jails to federal immigration authorities nearly tripled in 2025, reaching their highest level in years, according to Sheriff’s Office data presented Tuesday at a Board of Supervisors meeting.
Sheriff Kelly Martinez said the increase is tied to Operation Guardian Angel, a federal initiative launched in Los Angeles in May 2025 that relies on judicial warrants to bypass sanctuary law limits.
Detentions and deportations are soaring nationwide under a massive effort by the Trump administration to conduct the biggest immigration crackdown in the country’s history.
At Tuesday’s meeting, a crowd of community members and three of the five county supervisors urged Sheriff Martinez to stop assisting federal agents in county jails. But Martinez reiterated her opposition to the supervisors’ 2024 policy and explained why she would continue to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in detaining people at San Diego County jails if they have been charged with serious crimes.
“I believe it’s safer for the individuals who are transferred, and for the communities, for ICE to receive individuals who meet qualifications in a jail setting,” Martinez said. “If I did not take this position, it would create a situation where ICE would seek individuals in the community setting. We have all seen around the country how disruptive this can be and how traumatizing this can be for our communities.”
County resident Carol Stephenson, a member of the group Showing up for Racial Justice, said she has been coming to the annual presentations of the Sheriff’s Office for years.
“This year feels different,” Stephenson said. “We’ve been asking for no collaboration with ICE and really this year we have seen the scale just grow so enormously.”
She called the impact of the sheriff’s involvement in immigration detentions “horrific” and said that “families are afraid to go to work, afraid to take their kids to school, afraid to seek medical care, afraid to call law enforcement when they need help.”
In 2025 there were more transfers to ICE from county jails than any year since 2018, when state law first required the sheriff to present information on transfers to the board of supervisors. The total number of transfers almost tripled from 2024 to 2025, from 30 to 83 even though the total number of requests fell from 1,236 to 1,082.
Thirty of last year’s 83 transfers violated the county policy because the individuals were transferred without authorities obtaining judicial warrants. In another sign of cooperation with federal authorities, the Sheriff’s Office notified ICE of the release date of an additional 105 people.
The three Democratic supervisors on the board pressed the sheriff on the time and cost of facilitating such transfers during a difficult financial period for San Diego County and asked the sheriff what changes she might make.
Martinez said she would see if staff might be able to produce a cost estimate.
The Democratic supervisors did not suggest how or if their policy might be enforced.
“We know that the president is going to make sure that ICE gets their money,” said Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe. “Why on God’s green earth, when we are in a budget situation the way that we’re in, are we helping and participating?”
Montgomery Steppe said that she has received calls from people who are concerned about seeing deputies with ICE during raids.
The sheriff said that allegations that there was cooperation between the Sheriff’s Office and ICE in community-level enforcement are “categorically false,” and attributed the increase in transfers to an immigration initiative under the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“In May 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office initiated Operation Guardian Angel as a federal law enforcement initiative aimed at neutralizing California’s sanctuary state policies,” Martinez said. “This initiative encouraged ICE officials to obtain federal judicial arrest warrants for individuals in local California jails. Consequently, in 2025 there was an increase in transfers.”
Operation Guardian Angel was first announced by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California as a task force operating in Los Angeles. It includes agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They work out of an office in downtown Los Angeles to comb through data on local jails and obtain judicial warrants allowing them to take custody.
In response to questions by inewsource, the Sheriff’s Office later said it was not aware of the program task force operating in San Diego and that Martinez’s comment referred to broader federal enforcement trends.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office Southern District declined to comment in response to questions from inewsource about whether such a task force was operating in San Diego, and if so, what U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon’s involvement is.
The county passed a policy in December 2024 requiring ICE to present a judicial warrant before the county sheriff could cooperate in the transfer of anyone from county jails. inewsource first reported that at least 10 transfers in 2025 violated the board policy.
The sheriff said in her presentation Tuesday that the 83 individuals transferred from county jails generated a total of 245 bookings over the last seven years.
“I’d like to emphasize that these are serious and sometimes violent crimes and they represent real victims in our communities,” Martinez said.
The county sanctuary policy is stricter than the statewide policy known as the Values Act which allows for the cooperation of local law enforcement in transfer of people to ICE without a judicial warrant for a subset of serious crimes, mostly violent felonies.
Trump administration officials have said that so-called sanctuary policies force ICE to rely on the street level enforcement action that has led to controversial use of force in sanctuary cities across the county, like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, where ICE shot and killed two U.S. citizens.
When the policy passed in 2024, then Supervisor Nora Vargas said, “We will not allow our local resources to be used for actions that separate families, harm community trust, or divert critical local resources away from addressing our most pressing challenges.”
At the time, Martinez said she wouldn’t follow the supervisors’ policy and that the sheriff has “sole and exclusive authority to operate the county jails.”
On Tuesday supervisors were still seeking her cooperation.
“All I’m asking is a partnership to try,” Montgomery Steppe said. “We know that it’s hard to do it in real time, but to give us some sort of estimate or create some sort of methodology where you are calculating how much we are cooperating and what it’s costing us.”
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