Susan Ellenberg is a Santa Clara County board supervisor whose work involves setting local policies and overseeing departments and programs. As a strong and early advocate of anti-ICE policies, she was the only person to vote against reviewing our non-cooperation policy with ICE, believing that the review would do nothing but instill fear in residents. Verde spoke to her on Feb. 4, and the following is a transcript of the interview.<\/p>\n
Q: What is the likelihood of ICE coming to our county\/likelihood of us being in the same position as Minnesota?<\/p>\n
A: As opposed to a crackdown, which to me, suggests a stern legal response to illegal behavior, what we are seeing in Minneapolis and other places around the country is an illegal overreach of violence by ICE agents who are not at all looking to enforce immigration laws, but are attempting, and successfully so, to intimidate and discourage anyone from exercising their rights to free speech. The killings are murders. I don\u2019t know if they will be charged as such, but we all saw the videos. ICE is already here. They have an office in South San Jose. They are in the community, and we have a network that you probably know about called the Rapid Response Network who are called and alerted. Anytime there is suspected ICE activity, they show up with cell phones ready to document just in case. There\u2019s so much more happening than even meets the eye, than even comes to the media news. I have two friends who sit on the Hennepin County Board of Supervisors, which is in Minneapolis. That\u2019s where these actions are happening, and they are sharing with me that people are being picked up, taken to, and in most cases, people who are here with legal documentation are being taken to detention centers in Texas. They\u2019re ultimately released, but they are released with no ability to get back to Minnesota and no money. They have whatever was on them when they were detained. I am also hearing that they are releasing people in Minnesota away from the cities in areas that are freezing cold, unpopulated. They have launched groups of residents to be out in forests and less populated areas, looking for people who are released so that they can get them to warmth and safety. This is like a dystopian movie, except it\u2019s real. Of course, there could be more action here. In some ways, we create a bigger target for our community by being so vocally in opposition, but frankly, we\u2019re already a target. We\u2019re California, we\u2019re Santa Clara County. We have a reputation for being very progressive, very focused on constitutional rights and freedoms.<\/p>\n
Q: To what degree do you expect the new policies to be sufficient to blunt the impact of ICE in Santa Clara County if they come?<\/p>\n
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A: Policies are only as good as enforcement, and the county, the board of supervisors, our policy-setting body, does not have enforcement powers. Those are in the hands of all of the police departments and the sheriff\u2019s office. So my question to law enforcement is, are you going to enforce our local laws? If you see masked people claiming to be ICE, behaving as ICE, are you going to arrest them? Are you going to actually physically keep them out of the places that we say they can\u2019t go? Just like any law, it is only as good as the enforcement. So I don\u2019t know. I know that our sheriff\u2019s department and several of the local police departments have publicly said that they will not cooperate with ICE. They will not help ICE do their job, and I believe that\u2019s true. The bigger question is, will they arrest ICE agents or forcibly remove them? Or, frankly, if they do incite or commit acts of violence, will they pick them up and arrest them in the moment? I sure hope so. But I\u2019m watching with you. I haven\u2019t seen an example anywhere in the country yet of a local police force actually arresting an ICE officer on the spot.<\/p>\n
Q: Have there been moments where ICE agents have entered ICE-free zones that we aren\u2019t aware of? And have the police showed up to the scene and removed them?<\/p>\n
A: I don\u2019t have specific examples of that and what they are, and what they\u2019re likely to say is that they will only interfere if ICE breaks the law. Are they talking about local laws, state laws, or federal laws? There\u2019s a lot of hesitation and murkiness around this, which I think is unfortunate. I also understand local law enforcement\u2019s legitimate fear of escalating the violence, and we are seconds away from a real battle here. Are we prepared to call in the National Guard? Are we prepared to have our law enforcement shoot back? That\u2019s all scary, too. The cost of doing nothing, though, is that ICE gets bolder and bolder and will act with more and more impunity if nobody is stopping them.<\/p>\n
Q: Have these policies already had an observable impact on ICE activity in the county?<\/p>\n
A: It\u2019s hard to measure the absence of impact, but what I would like to think is that, because we are so vocal and proactive, that\u2019s why they haven\u2019t been deployed here the way they have been in Minnesota, the way they were in Oregon, because we are very visible. So impact would be seeing less action here, and so far, that is the case. It\u2019s not zero action, but we don\u2019t see them yet, walking plainly and visibly in the streets. And I would like to think that that\u2019s a credit, not only to the county\u2019s policy, but to San Jose\u2019s sheriffs, to the San Jose Police Department. As of last night, the city of Santa Clara finally approved a non-cooperation policy days ahead of the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n
Q: What role have you taken in the formation of these policies?<\/p>\n
A: I have been a very strong and early advocate for these policies since I became a member of the Board of Supervisors. In fact, in January I joined the board in January of 2019, and in March or April of that year. So during Trump\u2019s first administration, one of my colleagues wanted the board to review our non-cooperation policy with ICE to see if we wanted to make any changes. I was the only person who voted no on that, not even looking at it. I had a sense that if we reviewed the policy, we would end up keeping it the same. However, I knew that even the review of it was going to stoke so much fear and anxiety amongst our residents, and it was unnecessary, especially since we were probably going to maintain the same policy. \u2026Of course, I lost that vote, since it was four to one, which was a little bit scary for me, but I felt so strongly in my heart that this was the right thing to do. And ultimately, we did review the policy. We did not make any changes, as I suspected, but from one meeting to the time we actually reviewed, it was a time of enormous community stress, protests, outreach to the Board of Supervisors, and I think a lot of that anxiety was absolutely manufactured by the board, unnecessarily.<\/p>\n
Q: Are there any plans for future policies or policies currently being discussed? If so, what are they?<\/p>\n
A: Right now, we are watching to see the effectiveness of our current policies as they are played out this week. Certainly, our policies are not just about the Super Bowl, but this really is a very high-visibility test. We will certainly do an after-action review of how things went. We have more big actions. Some of the March Madness NCAA men\u2019s basketball games will be here. Of course, we have the FIFA games. Two years out, I understand some of the LA Olympic soccer games are actually going to be played here. This is a community that is going to remain highly, highly visible. So as we learn, we have to iterate. If there\u2019s something that we\u2019re not doing right now that we should, I am more than open to it. I\u2019m looking to see where we can be better. And if there\u2019s something we got wrong, we have to quickly acknowledge and fix that too. There\u2019s no way to do this perfectly. This has not happened, really, since before the country was formed. When was the last time there were really unsanctioned militias in our streets? This is not normal.<\/p>\n
Q: Is there anything we can do as Santa Clara County residents if we see suspected ICE activity in our neighborhood?<\/p>\n
A: Absolutely\u2014you call the Rapid Response Network \u2026 This is definitely a situation of if you see something, say something. We also have folks, some of the same folks in other groups are also really focused on potential human trafficking incidents. Bus drivers are trained, Uber and Lyft drivers have information about looking for particular scenarios that feel suspicious or not quite right. We did that 10 years ago when the Super Bowl was here. We\u2019re doing it again. Now, I\u2019ve learned so much that a sporting event is, unfortunately, so much more than a sporting event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Susan Ellenberg is a Santa Clara County board supervisor whose work involves setting local policies and overseeing departments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[88,90,89],"class_list":{"0":"post-184105","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-san-jose","9":"tag-san-jose-headlines","10":"tag-san-jose-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}