How a few Southern California politicians use public safety rhetoric to attack state’s sanctuary law

Some of the most powerful people in San Diego County have not been shy about their distaste for California’s chief “sanctuary” law and are challenging it every way they can, using fear-mongering rhetoric that has little basis in reality.

In one of the area’s largest cities, the El Cajon City Council recently passed a controversial resolution in an attempt to sanitize its mayor’s contempt for sanctuary policies that protect migrants from overzealous enforcement by couching it as a public safety measure. The resolution barely passed with a 3-2 vote on its third trip to the council in February.

El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells told inewsource in December he would be willing to violate the California Values Act, the 2017 law which prohibits state and local resources from being used to enforce federal immigration laws, with some exceptions. Law enforcement can still collaborate with federal immigration agencies through joint task forces and when targeting a person who has committed certain serious crimes. 

Eva Pacheco, a 34-year resident of El Cajon and member of the grassroots group Latinos En Acción, which has brought out dozens of community members to city meetings, believes the rationale for this measure is to support President Trump’s mass deportation plans and endanger El Cajon residents, she told me in Spanish.

After the resolution passed, Pacheco said that day many people preferred to stay home. “People we know who are undocumented stopped going to work, and they expressed a lot of fear when seeing El Cajon police officers.”

Wells, the main proponent of the resolution, used a public safety narrative to mislead the public about the state sanctuary law, suggesting that it constrains police officers from doing their jobs. He told right-wing media outlet One American News that the law does not allow any cooperation with the federal government regarding immigration, which is false. He has also vowed on social media to “fight the State of California tooth and nail.”

Other statements Wells has made about immigrants suggest that he subscribes to the white supremacist “great replacement theory,” which asserts that Democrats are purposefully bringing immigrants of color to the U.S. to replace white populations in white-majority voting counties. The El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people in a Walmart in 2019 espoused the same ideology.

An interview posted in December with a nonprofit explicitly promoting the theory revealed the depth of Wells’ belief in it. 

“I think it’s to take over the country from a power base,” he said. “You send these people to the big blue cities like Chicago and New York knowing that those people are going to vote Democrat and then they get reapportioned in the congressional roles, so they get extra congressional seats.” 

Tom Homen, the Trump administration’s border czar, has also endorsed the once-fringe replacement theory — as have many more aspiring and actively serving public officials.

Wells and El Cajon City Councilmember Steve Goble met with Homen in December 2024, and Wells apparently met with him again in January. In an email statement, Goble denied that his conversation with Homen included any prior agreement about using the El Cajon resolution as a way to challenge California’s sanctuary law in court. Yet there’s concern among immigrant rights advocates that may be the strategy.

Wells did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

El Cajon officials, again on a 3-2 vote, voted in March to send a support letter to U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado, who has introduced a bill in Congress that would amend a federal law to enable challenges to state laws like California’s Values Act.

Read More: A California sheriff is planning to break the state’s sanctuary law. Here’s how

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has been taking notice. His office responded to El Cajon’s letter about its legal obligations under the state sanctuary law. Along with a robust list of resources, state officials reminded El Cajon that “California law enforcement agencies are focused on criminal enforcement, rather than immigration enforcement.”

A 2020 UC Irvine study demonstrated that sanctuary policies do not increase violent or property crime rates. A Utah State University study from the same year even suggests sanctuary policies could decrease property crimes. Los Angeles, for example, has also long understood that public cooperation is vital for police work and barred officers from asking about citizenship status decades ago to ensure that trust remains.

Still, El Cajon is far from an outlier. Some California legislators have used a similar public safety rationale to push for harsher immigration enforcement legislation. State Sen. Brian Jones, the Senate minority leader, introduced a bill to “overhaul” the law. At a press conference announcing the proposal — with Wells flanking him — Jones said “the Safety Before Criminal Sanctuary Act is a commonsense measure, a simple reform, to tighten up California’s sanctuary state policy, in favor of better public safety.”  

Assemblymember Kate Sanchez, a Rancho Santa Margarita Republican, has introduced Assembly Bill 324 that would add exceptions to the Values Act by permitting law enforcement officers to detain someone who is “alleged to have violated … specified provisions relating to sex trafficking,” even if they haven’t been convicted. In an interview with Fox News, Sanchez described how her bill fit with Trump’s plans to deport millions of people by appealing to the same public safety argument. 

“We want safe communities; we want to be able to uphold the rule of law,” she said.

Another bill, AB 85, attempts to outright gut the protective nature of the state’s sanctuary law. But the author, Bill Essayli, resigned from the Assembly last week to become a federal prosecutor for the Trump administration, leaving the fate of the bill in question. 

Salvador Sarmiento, campaign director with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and a member of the ICE Out of California Coalition, a group that advocates to end entanglements between California law enforcement agencies and ICE, noted that anti-sanctuary strategies failed in Orange County during Trump’s first term. 

“The racist political stunt sparked a huge backlash,” he told me. “The nativist council members were ousted, GOP members of Congress were outraged and the community prevailed.”

The strategies have notably changed at the start of Trump’s second term, and MAGA Republicans in California are eagerly doing his bidding. Trump has already signed an executive order targeting jurisdictions with policies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration forces and has threatened to cut federal funding, without providing details about what funds would be cut.

Nonetheless, the community in El Cajon remains resilient as these policies creep closer. Pacheco told me that “even though these are anti-immigrant policies we are resisting, and this resolution is causing us to keep participating and to not be afraid. We are here and we will remain here.”