The testimony was both passionate and sobering — stories of immigrant mothers being yanked out of car windows in front of their children by federal ICE agents — but the county supervisors concluded there was little they could do in the moment except to express their own outrage.
“As we watch our rights being thrown out the window, these are very petrifying times to be in our country right now,” said Supervisor Laura Capps in a meeting room packed with immigration rights activists from Santa Maria to Oxnard. The intensity of the moment was obviously fueled by the Trump Administration’s policy of mass deportations and its open disregard for the due process considerations promised in the Constitution.
All but two of the 35 people who spoke urged the supervisors to stop County Sheriff Bill Brown from collaborating in any manner with federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. More specifically, they didn’t want Brown turning county jail inmates who were in the country illegally over to ICE. Under state law, Brown is already limited in the degree to which he can communicate with ICE, but given recent accounts of ICE agents hauling away an immigrant father at an Oxnard gas station in front of his child, anything seemed too much.