Dozens of people rallied outside City Hall before Wednesday’s City Council meeting to protest what they said was a dramatic increase in federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in town recently, including an incident near an Encinitas elementary school.
They waved in hand-made signs in both English and Spanish while TV cameras filmed them in front of City Hall, then filed inside to speak at the podium during the time period the council sets aside at each meeting for items not on the agenda. Participants included everyone from activists who regularly monitor ICE vehicles’ movements to people who work with students at area schools.
Audrey Critchlow, a retired Encinitas Union School District teacher who previously worked at Capri Elementary, said a recent ICE incident near that school has traumatized the community.
“This is creating a true climate of fear,” she told the City Council.
A doctor whose parents had moved to the U.S. from Canada decades ago said the American ideals that her mom passionately believes in aren’t now being met by federal officials, and several people said Encinitas city officials weren’t doing enough to stand up to ICE and prevent its vehicles from congregating near area churches and the Magdalena Ecke Family YMCA. Bill Sparks, co-founder of the Los Angelitos de Encinitas afterschool youth programs, read a passage from Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diary about abductions of Jewish people and said it made him think of what was going on in the United States these days.
“We know what’s wrong,” he told the council, adding, “stand up and do the right thing.”
Before they made their comments, City Manager Jennifer Campbell told the crowd that she knows of two recent ICE enforcement actions within the city limits and city employees have filed federal Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain more information about them. As city officials receives these documents, they will post them on a city web page devoted to immigration information, she said.
That web page, which was established last fall following the controversial arrest of a father near Park Dale Lane Elementary, can be found at: https://www.encinitasca.gov/government/immigration-information
The first incident that Campbell mentioned Wednesday involved a dad who was dropping off a child off at Capri Elementary early Friday morning. The city’s web site states that several sport utility vehicles belonging to immigration enforcement employees “surrounded the father’s vehicle, which was approximately 150 yards from the school” and agents ordered the father to leave the vehicle, saying he was under arrest.
“The father did not exit the vehicle,” the city web site posting continues. “The agents then decided to let him go and (left) the area.”
Campbell said Encinitas received no advance notice of this enforcement action or one that happened Saturday involving a man in his 20s who was chased by an enforcement officer while running through a backyard along Via Tavira. In addition to those two incidents, the city’s web site also mentions a report of an unmarked immigration enforcement vehicle parked at the YMCA parking lot Tuesday.
Federal immigration enforcement agents are reportedly in the midst of a recently begun, 45-day enforcement surge in California. It’s one of many such efforts that agents have conducted nationally since early 2025 when President Trump took office. Immigrant advocates have charged that the latest surge aims to intimidate immigrants who have become U.S. citizens., and thus make it less likely that they will vote in the November elections.