The Sacramento Co. Board of Supervisors approved a contract entering the Sheriff’s Office into a task force with federal agencies, targeting criminal cartels.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A controversial contract approved earlier this month by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors has some community members worried about the Sheriff’s Office collaborating with ICE.

Since 2019, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office says, it has been part of a regional task force of federal law enforcement agencies aimed at targeting transnational criminal organizations—including drug cartels and violent gangs—called the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), through the U.S. Department of Justice.

ICE—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is under the Department of Homeland Security—was involved, but just as one of many federal member agencies.

On inauguration day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order establishing a new initiative to go after transnational organized crime, called the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF). This one is co-led by the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations branch (ICE-HSI). (OCDETF no longer exists; HSTF replaced it.)

“The HSTF’s mission is to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States; dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks; end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking with particular focus on offenses involving children. That’s really what the crux of this is,” commander for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Homeland Security Bureau Lt. Rod Grassmann said.

At a Sacramento County Supervisors meeting earlier this month, Grassmann asked the Board to retroactively approve a contract, formally including the Sheriff’s Office in the Sacramento-San Francisco Homeland Security Task Force. It spans the federal fiscal year, which runs October through September. SCSO is the fiduciary, fronting rent at the task force’s Rancho Cordova headquarters at approximately $45,000 per month, according to Sheriff Jim Cooper’s May 12 letter to the Board of Supervisors. The FBI may reimburse SCSO up to $500,000 per year, plus the Sheriff’s Office can receive 5% of assets seized in criminal investigations.

Local community members – both in-person and in dozens of emails ahead of the meeting – expressed concerns about the contract, citing stepped up federal immigration enforcement nationwide by ICE and other federal officers causing fear in immigrant communities.

“The language of that Memorandum of Understanding mirrors the language of Trump’s executive order,” said AJ Albano, a volunteer with Decarcerate Sacramento, which raised awareness about this matter on the supervisors’ agenda. “Explicit in that is that the HSTF’s mission includes ensuring ‘the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.’”

Christopher-Camilo Carbajal-Carbajal is program and campaign coordinator with Decarcerate Sacramento.

“The Board of Supervisors doesn’t have much power over the Sheriff. The only power that they do have is the contracts that they sign on behalf of the Sheriff, like this memorandum, and the budget that they sign on a yearly basis,” Carbajal-Carbajal said. “We want to see legitimate oversight and accountability for the Sheriff’s department. Just because they’re an elected position doesn’t mean that they are able to govern themselves…We want to make sure that the Sheriff’s department is accountable to the community, is accountable to us.”

Grassmann pointed out that California law – SB 54 – prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from assisting federal immigration enforcement.

“There is nothing to do with civil removal or immigration status, any of that. We’re looking at criminals,” Grassmann said. “Before I even had conversations – deep conversations – with our federal partners about joining this team, that was the first thing that I said to them. We cannot do anything with ICE or civil removal. We’re not sharing information with the feds that would facilitate that.”

That doesn’t reassure Albano.

“We don’t even know if there’s any written assurances, like from the Sheriff’s Office, to say that they explicitly will not collaborate with ICE,” Albano said. “They just say it verbally at Board of Supervisors meetings or publicly, generally.”

Two supervisors voted against the contract, both saying they wanted more time to get clarification on ICE’s role in the task force: Supervisors Phil Serna and Patrick Kennedy.

“Without the clarification that we’ve asked for, I won’t vote for it,” Kennedy said. “I can’t just take someone’s word for it at the podium. The staff report did not make that clear. The contract did not make that clear.”

Kennedy said that, after seeing ICE and other federal immigration officers wreak havoc in communities like Minneapolis, Chicago and LA over the past year, he wants “to be comfortable before we move forward with the task force and into any relationship with Homeland Security and ICE.”

With a majority of supervisors approving the contract, it is set for the current fiscal year.

“I will continue to have conversations with the Sheriff, who’s been very cooperative with us in this regard, to ensure that ICE does not have the presence in our community that we’ve seen in other communities,” Kennedy said.

Supervisors Rich Desmond, Pat Hume and Rosario Rodriguez voted in favor of the contract.

“For me, the ‘yes’ vote was that this is pretty much procedural,” Rodriguez said. “It is an organization that has been in effect for a long time and there are no changes to that, to the way that it’s currently set up and operating. So I didn’t have concerns.”

The current contract runs through September 30 and must be renewed every year.

ABC10 reached out to ICE and the FBI to ask about the task force and community concerns. The FBI replied, said it is working on a response. ABC10 did not hear back from ICE or the Department of Homeland Security.

More from ABC10: U.S. Border Patrol chief Michael Banks announces resignation amid immigration leadership shake-up

ABC10: Watch, Download, Read






































1
/
12