Immigrant advocates, community groups and Escondido residents plan to gather at City Hall Thursday at 11 a.m. to repeat demands that Mayor Dane White and Police Chief Ken Plunkett end a city contract allowing federal immigration agents to use a police-operated firing range.
The renewed call for the contract cancellation comes more than a month after the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted to end a similar arrangement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a firing range in Otay Mesa. Those county contracts were previously unknown to the public before inewsource reported on them in April.
The organizers of Thursday’s news conference said in a press release that they will speak about “recently released internal city documents that raise further questions about the safety implications” of the firing range arrangement.
In a related press release, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network linked to documents they obtained from the city which it says show, among other things, that ICE officers using the range were deployed to the controversial immigration operation in Minneapolis earlier this year, which left two U.S. citizens dead in January.