Would Aguirre repeal sanctuary rule? What’s McCann’s stance on ICE? What a supervisor race could mean for immigrants

After immigration raids in San Diego and efforts by President Donald Trump efforts to put down Los Angeles protests with military force, the two people vying to represent South County as a county supervisor have presented conflicting visions of how the county should handle an immigration system controlled largely by the federal government.

And the involvement of local law enforcement in responding to protests has focused new attention on state and local laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, and the District 1 candidates’ positions on both.

Whoever is elected to the now-split San Diego County Board of Supervisors will help determine how the county should use its limited authority to challenge — or cooperate with — federal authorities, as advocates call to expand protections for immigrants.

Asked their positions on recent federal enforcement and how they believe the county should respond, the Democrat, Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, criticized immigration authorities. The Republican, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, declined to weigh in.

On May 30, heavily armed officers stormed two Buona Forchetta restaurants at the northern edge of District 1, where they were met by protesters. Since then, raids in Los Angeles County prompted more protests, and Trump has federalized and deployed state National Guard troops to put them down, a move California officials called illegal and sued to block.

McCann has been silent on the South Park raid and did not answer a question from The San Diego Union-Tribune last week about the operation. On Monday, he did not respond to queries about the Los Angeles protests and Trump’s deployment of the guard.

“As a county supervisor, my job is to focus on the work of San Diego County, and how we can better serve the people of San Diego with limited resources,” McCann said in an email last week.

Aguirre, like many other local elected Democrats, has expressed outrage over the Buona Forchetta raid and over the federal government’s response to the Los Angeles protests. In a weekend statement, she called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “rogue agency” and questioned why McCann had been silent about recent events.

Aguirre aligns with fellow Democrats and immigrant advocates in many ways, including in wanting to preserve a legal aid program for detained immigrants. But she has diverged from many of them in her stance on one key local piece of immigration policy — a sanctuary policy the Board of Supervisors adopted late last year.

McCann has long opposed sanctuary policies at both the local and state level and has called for eliminating the Immigrant Rights Legal Defense program, which has spent millions providing attorneys to about 2,500 San Diegans detained over the years at a federal facility in Otay Mesa.

For immigrant advocacy groups, the county policy is a bare-minimum protection to ensure that no county resources go toward immigration enforcement.

“It did represent a significant vision forward for how we should protect all residents,” said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program.

“There is certainly a possibility that certain of the County Board of Supervisors might be considering much more regressive ways of interacting with the immigrant community,” he added. “That’s one of the concerns that I have about how the election might go.”

Criticism of sanctuary policies

In December, weeks before she unexpectedly left office, then-Supervisor Nora Vargas pushed for county law enforcement to halt all cooperation with federal authorities, going beyond restrictions already in place under state law.

Sheriff Kelly Martinez resisted, maintaining that she would continue to follow the few carve-outs permitted in California’s sanctuary statute — including notifying federal authorities when undocumented immigrants convicted of certain felony crimes are set to be released from jail.

Aguirre, a frequent Vargas critic, has called the policy a “mistake” and criticized the board for not working with the sheriff on the measure.

But despite her misgivings, last week she declined to revisiting or overturning the policy.

McCann is frank in his opposition to the policy.

“I oppose the County of San Diego’s super sanctuary policy, because it puts violent criminals that have committed rape on children, brutal murders and other violent heinous crimes back on the street. I believe these violent criminals should be deported,” he told the Union-Tribune in an email.

It isn’t only the county’s more expansive policy that he has opposed.

In 2017, while a member of the Chula Vista City Council, McCann voted against a local measure expressing for the state’s sanctuary legislation.

The state law, known as SB 54 or the California Values Act, was ultimately enacted that year and took effect in 2018.

The future of legal aid

Whatever the barriers between the county and the federal government on immigration, immigrant advocates see the county’s legal aid program as a tangible benefit that supervisors can and should expand.

If elected, McCann would not be alone in his calls to slash the $5 million program.

The county’s two Republican supervisors — Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond — have both singled it out for elimination, citing a projected $138 million budget shortfall and the fact that immigration is under federal jurisdiction.

Immigration attorney Andrew Nietor has taken about 200 cases through the program, mainly immigrants detained because of past convictions who are eligible for bond and people from war-torn countries who would normally be eligible to apply for asylum.

“On their own, they would have had a really hard time understanding how to fill out forms and get applications and things like that,” Nietor said. “They always have a much better success rate of getting out on bond if they have an attorney and of getting relief.”

Earlier this year, the board considered a measure backed by Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer aimed to expand the program to people who were not in custody but were facing deportation. The effort failed with only two votes in .

Nietor sees unaccompanied children as the group of immigrants in most urgent need of legal help. The Trump istration has ended funding for legal representation for them and defied a judge’s orders to reinstate it while the ruling is appealed.

In San Diego, many attorneys are continuing to represent children without being paid, but if that doesn’t happen, the families sponsoring the children have to pay for an attorney or hope a nonprofit can step in to help, said Maria Chavez, an immigration attorney who sits on the county’s advisory board for the legal aid fund.

“Children are some of the most vulnerable people,” Chavez said. “Now we’ve got 3-, 4-year-olds having to go to court completely unrepresented. Even if you’re 12, 13, 14, it’s not like you can adequately advocate for yourself.”

With the July 1 election now only weeks away, other local immigrant advocates now find themselves worrying not only about a Republican-controlled board that might abandon the legal aid program and align with Trump, but also of a Democratic-controlled board they worry might be reluctant to step up with resources.

Illustrations of that came just in recent years under the Biden istration, when San Diego County was led by Democrats, noted Meghan Zavala, a policy analyst for Al Otro Lado, an advocacy and legal aid group for immigrants both in the U.S. and Mexico.

When U.S. Border Patrol released thousands of immigrants onto San Diego streets last year, the county provided resources on the ground like food and water and diverted money to a nonprofit.

But when Border Patrol corralled immigrants in open-air detention sites in the desert near Jacumba Hot Springs, the county declined to help community groups provide similar aid because they viewed it as a federal issue, Zavala said.

“There was a lot of preventable harm that occurred during this time, because it basically rested on the nonprofits to haul aid to these sites every single day,” Zavala said. “This engagement we had with the county was helpful — but it wasn’t perfect.”