Spurred by concerns over federal immigration enforcement, the San Jose City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a 45-day moratorium on new detention facilities, broadened to include public property.
The freeze takes effect immediately and comes two weeks after the council first endorsed the plan on Sept. 15.
The push comes in the wake of a halted ICE center in nearby Gilroy. Local officials were largely unaware of that project until work began in May, prompting a federal judge to suspend development last month.
“We have the right and responsibility to ensure that any new development proposed in our city complies with local regulations that protect public health, public safety, and the surrounding environment,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan told this news organization. “This pause gives our planners time to study and understand the many risks associated with projects that were never contemplated in our community until this Administration came along.”
While officials recognized local laws cannot supersede state and federal authority, leveraging municipal rules aims to create administrative hurdles for anyone seeking to build such facilities. San Jose already prohibits its property from being used to stage immigration enforcement operations.
These local measures come weeks after Bay Area leaders urged city and county governments to leverage their local authority to push back against immigration crackdowns. San Jose and San Mateo County are among the first in the region to introduce such bans. Monterey County also passed a similar moratorium earlier this week.
Aside from human rights concerns, both San Jose and San Mateo County cited the need to study impacts on local infrastructure, water supply, wastewater capacity, the power grid, and emergency response.
U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo, who has been urging communities across the region to use their local power to block federal facilities, said in a statement this week that advancing the ordinance will make it difficult for the federal government to convert industrial and commercial sites into ICE detention centers.
“Local communities cannot control ICE rogue agents, but federal courts have upheld the authority of cities and towns to determine how and where DHS can build the infrastructure that enables this cruelty and chaos, namely ICE detention centers and processing facilities,” Liccardo said.
According to the Santa Clara County Public Health Department, approximately 134,000 undocumented immigrants live in the county, 44% of whom were born in Mexico.