California sheriff kicks ICE off county firing ranges, suddenly discovers border enforcement matters

BS BULLETIN

San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez has barred ICE from sheriff facilities used for training and firearms qualifications, citing community concerns about the agency.
The county Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to end access for both ICE and CBP — but Martinez says CBP will remain.
CBP says the range supports training for about 1,700 officers and losing it could reduce border staffing and slow trade and travel.

San Diego County has managed to produce a perfect little snapshot of the modern immigration debate.

Federal immigration enforcement? Politically toxic. Border commerce, shorter crossing lines and thousands of trucks carrying goods into the United States every day? Well, now everybody gets practical.

San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez announced Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer be permitted to use Sheriff’s Office facilities for training or firearms qualifications. Her office formally posted the announcement Tuesday afternoon, saying the decision was grounded in concerns about community trust. “Community trust and strong relationships are the cornerstone of effective local policing,” Martinez said, adding that her authority depends on “the trust and confidence of the communities we serve.”

But there is a rather fascinating wrinkle. Martinez is refusing to do the same thing to Customs and Border Protection.

That puts her directly at odds with San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors, which voted 3-2 Tuesday to terminate agreements allowing both ICE and CBP to use county training facilities. The vote split along party lines, with three Democratic supervisors supporting the move and two Republicans opposing it.

The Board wants both agencies out. The sheriff says ICE can go — but CBP stays. Why?

Martinez says CBP’s work at San Diego’s ports of entry is so deeply tied to the region’s economy and everyday transportation that depriving its officers of nearby firearms training could cause real-world consequences.

And suddenly the conversation became considerably less theoretical.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, more than 225,000 people enter the United States through San Diego ports of entry each day, including tens of thousands of vehicles, pedestrians and thousands of commercial trucks. Border waits can already stretch between one and three hours.

CBP officers have mandatory firearms qualification requirements. If they cannot train at the nearby Otay Mesa facility, they could have to leave their regular assignments for longer periods to train elsewhere.

The Sheriff’s Office warned that could mean fewer officers staffing inspection booths. “Without this ability, lanes will close and wait times will be extended,” the department said.

There it is. The inconvenient little phrase that tends to ruin ideological immigration policy:

Consequences.

CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott was even more forceful. He said the agency relies on the county range to train roughly 1,700 officers and warned that forcing them to travel elsewhere for mandatory qualification would reduce local staffing and hurt the movement of people and commerce across the border. “It is unprecedented for a local partner, such as the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, to knowingly undermine border security and put our communities at risk,” Scott said.

Martinez appears to agree — at least when it comes to CBP. “Too many people on both sides of the border would be harmed by a decision to end CBP’s use of the facility,” she said. “As Sheriff, I have a duty to protect and serve everyone who lives in or enters San Diego County.”

That argument did not sway the Democratic supervisors pushing the ban. Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer has argued that San Diego County should not provide local resources to assist the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda. “Our community is a home, not a target,” Lawson-Remer said. “If the Trump administration wants to spend billions on this law and deportation agenda, they can use their own federal resources to carry it out.”

Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe was equally blunt. “Federal immigration agents have harmed our communities many different ways here locally and throughout the nation,” she said. “We just don’t want to be complicit in that.”

But Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond pointed out one of the stranger contradictions in the entire argument. Even accepting the criticism that ICE officers have sometimes gone too far, how exactly is preventing them from training supposed to make them better? “ICE has overreached and overstepped, but how do you fix that?” Desmond asked. “You fix it with more training.”

Hard to argue with the logic. If your complaint is that armed officers need better judgment, better tactics or better preparation, depriving them of training facilities is an awfully peculiar remedy.

San Diego County officials say ICE and CBP have logged more than 3,300 hours of training at the county facility since 2024. CBP has had an agreement to use it since 2017, while ICE’s agreement dates to 2021. ICE has also used a Navy-owned range at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar under a separate county arrangement since 2022.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the dispute now appears headed for a showdown between two sets of elected officials: the Board of Supervisors, which voted to terminate both agencies’ agreements, and Sheriff Martinez, who says she intends to preserve CBP’s access. Exactly how that institutional fight gets resolved remains unclear.

But politically, the contradiction is already plain enough.

ICE enforcement is treated as something San Diego County must distance itself from in the name of community trust.

CBP enforcement, meanwhile, turns out to be indispensable once somebody starts calculating border wait times, commercial traffic and economic damage.

Funny how quickly ideology meets a calculator.