Officials in El Cajon, California, postponed a vote on a city resolution giving local officials more freedom to assist President-elect Donald Trump’s promised effort to deport illegal immigrants.
City staff are reworking language on the resolution after some residents expressed concern about the proposal during a city council meeting this week.
Bill Wells, the city’s Republican mayor, spearheaded the measure to provide federal law enforcement more leeway to support Trump and his “border czar,” Tom Homan, as they prepare to remove illegal immigrants from the country, particularly those who have committed violent crimes. The resolution seeks to address a 2017 California law, Senate Bill 54, that restricts the extent to which state and local law enforcement officials can cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
However, some residents, among them Sergio Conti, expressed concern that the move would “destroy the life of many families that only want to work in peace and give a future to their children.”
The debate comes as Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) administration has vowed to resist Trump’s deportation effort, with Attorney General Rob Bonta warning his office would “step in” if state and local law enforcement agencies violate SB 54.
El Cajon City Manager Graham Mitchell argued Tuesday that the resolution was needed to make sure local law enforcement could work with federal officials to remove illegal immigrants convicted of violent felonies.
“One of the concerns that was raised by the city council is we’re now receiving some requests from the federal government to assist in immigration enforcement, specifically with those that are in the United States, not here legally, that have been convicted of a violent felony and are roaming at large,” Mitchell said. “And so there’s a concern about routing our community of those individuals, and thus far in California, local government agencies are not allowed to assist in that effort.”
In recent comments to a local news outlet, Wells said local officers could face legal retaliation from state officials if they cooperated with federal law enforcement’s illegal immigration crackdown.
“We’ve got the federal government saying that we can be prosecuted if we don’t cooperate with them. We’ve got the state government saying our police officers could be prosecuted if they do cooperate with the federal government. These are things we should know. We should have this all worked out,” he said.
Last year, Wells told journalist Nick Shirley, “In California, we’re not allowed to have any communication with ICE or with the border patrol at all.”
“If we were to arrest somebody that was under indictment for some other crime, We couldn’t tell ICE that they were here if we even if we knew. In fact, we’re not even allowed to ask them,” he said.
However, Pedro Rios, the local director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program, argued Wells’s resolution is rooted in a darker agenda.
“It is driven by an anti-immigrant fervor that is concerning for residents in El Cajon who might fear that suddenly the police will be after them, asking them for papers,” he told CBS 8.
Wells has rebuffed the accusation.
“This is not about taking our police force and turning them into Border Patrol agents. This is about cooperating with the federal government and following the law,” he said. “The intention is not to take our police department and have them rounding people up. That’s not the intention at all.”
Located just a few miles from the border, El Cajon holds more than 100,000 people and sits east of downtown San Diego. In 2022, 28.7% of the city’s residents were noncitizens.
El Cajon’s resolution states that the city “remains steadfast in its commitment to protecting the safety and well-being of its residents, particularly those most vulnerable to criminal activities such as human trafficking and drug distribution.”
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It also “declares its intent to assist federal immigration authorities in their enforcement efforts to the maximum legal extent possible under SB 54, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S Constitution, and other applicable laws for the purpose of removing those posing a threat to public safety from our community.”
Under the resolution, the city would request clarification and guidance from Bonta’s office “regarding the legal parameters of cooperation with federal immigration authorities under SB 54 and potential conflicts with federal law.”