Transparency laws are not enough to make our immigrant community safe.

In the years that President Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in 2017, and then again in 2025, California state leaders organized both defensive and offensive strategies to mitigate his most disruptive policies, including immigration.

In 2017, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 54, known as the California Values Act, and Assembly Bill 2792, the Truth Act, providing certain protections and protocols around people’s immigration status, the latter specific to incarceration facilities. Back in 2015 – when Barack Obama was president – then-sheriff Steve Bernal partnered with ICE, setting the agency up with a desk in the county jail, and deportations from the facility soared. (In 2016, ICE agents arrested 391 people in the jail. In 2025, by comparison, the jail released 21 inmates into ICE custody.)

When the new laws took effect in 2018, the number of ICE arrests in the jail plummeted. We know that largely thanks to the Truth Act, the transparency partner to SB 54.

Combined, the laws have meant consistently many fewer inmates released directly to ICE. They’ve also meant an annual report, roughly two pages long, that has come to feel somewhat routine – transparency can easily become a box to check.

But when the annual update happened on Tuesday, Jan. 27, with three officials from the Sheriff’s Office presenting to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, tensions ran high. Sheriff Tina Nieto, Undersheriff Keith Boyd and Corrections Bureau Chief Tim Lanquist all – frustratingly – joined by video call, instead of in-person. (Had they been listening to the impassioned comments? The supervisors asked, and Nieto said yes, but of course behind a screen it’s impossible to know.)

Of course this annual update happened against the backdrop of a massive ICE action in Minneapolis, which has been met with massive protests. In the wake of ICE officers shooting and killing two legal observers, Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, people are feeling understandably shaken.

“They are really afraid.”

“Many of our community members have said to me: ‘If they are willing to kill two white citizens in front of everyone, what are they willing to do to the community of color, the immigrants who get detained?’” says Adriana Melgoza, executive director of the Watsonville Law Center and a volunteer with the Solidarity Network, which coordinates legal observers to monitor immigration enforcement.

“The community was feeling a little bit more at ease because they were not seeing mass enforcement. After these couple of weeks what we’ve seen is people going back to that stage of fear and overwhelm… They are really afraid.”

I spoke to Melgoza on Monday, Jan. 26, when the Solidarity Network assigned volunteers to monitor the campus of CSU Monterey Bay. Students learned via email that morning that an official from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program would be on campus to conduct an audit.

According to CSUMB officials, this is a routine audit, and the last one happened roughly one year ago. Part of the difference then was that it’s likely nobody even knew it was happening – a new state law, Senate Bill 98, was passed last September. The bill, known as the SAFE Act (Secure and Fair Enforcement), calls for notification on school campuses of any type of immigration enforcement activity. Its intent is to make campuses safer so students and staff know what is happening, but for some of CSUMB’s 108 international students, it sparked fear. Melgoza knows because she and her fellow volunteers were in direct contact with them, including some who left campus.

Of course, these policies have the best intentions of transparency. But in current circumstance, they are spurring more fear.

On Jan. 27, Melgoza addressed the supervisors about the Truth Act. “We, as legal services providers, cannot go to the community and say there is no collaboration with ICE when indeed we have collaboration,” she said. “We have seen a significant increase in calls from community members who are afraid to contact any law enforcement at all because they fear immigration consequences.”

This is exactly what the Trump administration wants – a community so paralyzed with fear that they cede their civil liberties even before ICE comes and takes them by force.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.