County ends gun range agreements with ICE and CBP
Customs and Border Protection said the move would increase border wait times, but immigrant rights activists pushed back, saying that funding training falls under the federal government's responsibility, not the county’s.
Written by Jenna Ramiscal, Edited by Kate Morrissey
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a proposal on Tuesday that would end gun range agreements with federal immigration agencies.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have both used county gun ranges for years to train officers and agents. The proposal, put forward by District 3 Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer and District 1 Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, intends to quickly end that access.
“It's about whether this county keeps lending its own property to the agencies our residents fear the most,” Aguirre said. “The federal government can't terrorize their families all week and rent our hiring range on the weekend.”
Sheriff Kelly Martinez, in a press release, said she has notified ICE it will no longer be allowed to use the facilities. However, she is pushing for Customs and Border Protection to retain access, potentially creating another instance of her making a decision that does not align with the board's wishes.
The board passed the proposal in a 3-2 vote, with District 2 Supervisor Joel Anderson and District 5 Supervisor Jim Desmond voting against it. The county would have received more than $120,000 annually for the use of two firing ranges by ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Rodney S. Scott, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, called the proposal “reckless, irresponsible and ignorant,” and said that the termination of the contracts at the San Diego Regional Firearms Training Center would cause longer wait times at the border, make it harder to staff ports of entry and impact the efficiency of binational trade.
“The San Diego County Board of Supervisors is poised to slam on the brakes at all San Diego County ports for political reasons,” Scott said via an emailed statement. “The completely avoidable increase in wait times to cross the border for both people and cargo will rest on the decision of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.”
Scott served as head of the San Diego Border Patrol Sector when immigration officials killed a Mexican man, Anastasio Hernández Rojas, and a U.S. citizen, Valeria Tachiquín. Their killings have many similarities with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year with Scott at the helm of Customs and Border Protection.
Deaths like these at the hands of immigration officials fueled activists’ support for the termination of the gun range contracts.
Activists in the county have been pushing for change since an inewsource investigation revealed that immigration agencies had been using the county-owned facilities. The day before the board meeting, nearly 50 people, from organizations including Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, Indivisible and Sing for Change, stood behind Lawson-Remer and Aguirre at a press conference to support the proposal.
Earlier this year, community members similarly pushed back on Escondido police contracting with ICE and Border Patrol for use of its gun range. Escondido Councilmember Consuelo Martinez attended the press conference and called in a public comment to show support for terminating the contracts.
“Are our public resources being used in ways that reflect our values and protect the people that we serve?” the councilmember said. “As local leaders and policy makers we have a responsibility to make sure that publicly funded facilities and assets are not contributing to an immigration and enforcement system that is inflicting fear and cruelty on our communities.”
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to requests for comment before publication.
Scott said roughly 1,700 Customs and Border Protection officers use the facilities for mandatory firearms training, and that cutting off the agency’s usage of the firing range will lead to staffing issues causing increased wait times at land, sea and air entryways, including at San Ysidro, Otay Mesa, Tecate, the Cross Border Xpress, and the San Diego International Airport and Seaport.
Sidney Aki, director of field operations at the San Diego Field Office, attended the board meeting and shared similar concerns.
Aki said that the San Diego Field Office is the busiest in the nation with over 225,000 pedestrian crossings, 90,000 passenger vehicles and over 5,500 commercial trucks with $174 million in merchandise going north daily at the local border.
Sheriff Martinez said in a press release that Customs and Border Protection doesn't have another training facility option.
However, activists, Lawson-Remer and Aguirre pushed back on the agency's claims about border wait times. They said the federal government provides Customs and Border Protection and ICE with a multi-billion dollar budget, and with that, the agencies should fund their own training facilities and staffing.
“Washington is responsible for pulling thousands of its own officers off the border and out of our ports to run raids in American cities,” Aguirre said. “The Trump administration has billions of dollars to keep lanes open, and if they're worried about staffing our ports, they can send these officers back to the border or provide the funding to do it. We don't answer fear with more fear. We can't trade our values for a license fee.”
At the press conference about the proposal prior to the board meeting, a sign memorialized seven people killed by immigration officials, including Pretti, Good and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
Aki said that Customs and Border Patrol officials have distinct roles separate from ICE that include assisting with trade, blocking the smuggling of drugs across the border and preventing human trafficking. However, Aguirre and activists said President Donald Trump’s administration has pulled officials outside of ICE into working immigration raids, where officials have shot — and in 11 cases killed — people around the country.
Lilian Serrano from Southern Borders Community Coalition said her organization has spent years demanding that the federal government invest more in the cross border communities, but San Diego still experiences long wait times. She said diverting border officials to participate in ICE raids to meet deportation quotas increases wait times.
“Our region is experiencing the consequences of federal decisions that prioritize terrorizing families over responding to the very real needs of border communities,” Serrano said.
Activists emphasized that these priorities have instilled fear within the community.
At the meeting, Alondra Alvarez from Universidad Popular played an audio clip of a mother and her young children crying as ICE officers arrested the family’s father in Escondido.
In the audio, the mother says, “Mira mi niño — ayúdame, ayúdame! No tenemos a nadie más.” Look at my child — help me, help me! We have no one else.
Then, her child cries out, “Lo van a matar!” They are going to kill him!
Alvarez said she shared the audio so that the board, community members and Customs and Border Protection officials in the audience would hear the fear directly. She said oftentimes people are desensitized to the fear immigrant families feel.
“If you're not in it, and if your boots are not on the ground, and if you are not holding the hand of the families that are impacted by these raids, how is it possible for you to be able to understand what that fear sounds like?” Alvarez said.
Alvarez said the proposal is about ensuring that the county does not take responsibility or support federal agencies that are responsible for this fear.
“To me, I put value in the people that make up this country and not the billions of dollars that will inevitably come into this country,” Alvarez said. “The fact that they're levying this contract and this training facility as the end-all, be-all to a billion-dollar industry is idiotic, and it's really glossing over the very real lives that are being impacted.”
Alvarez said she felt relieved that the proposal passed.
“San Diego County families that are impacted by immigration raids, that are living in fear, were heard a little bit more today,” she said.
