SLO County was named a ‘sanctuary jurisdiction’ in Trump target list. Is it one?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- DHS briefly listed SLO County as a sanctuary jurisdiction, then withdrew list
- State laws like TRUTH and TRUST Acts restrict local cooperation with ICE
- County says it complies with valid laws but does not self-identify as sanctuary
In response to an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to crack down on immigration enforcement, the agency published a list May 29 of “sanctuary jurisdictions” across the United States it said were deliberately obstructing federal immigration laws — then just as quickly took the list down.
Both San Luis Obispo city and the county as a whole were included on the list.
An April 28 executive order directed Homeland Security to “publish a list of states and local jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws (sanctuary jurisdictions)“ within one month of the order and to “pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to end these violations and bring such jurisdictions into compliance with the laws of the United States.” It also directed federal agencies to cut off funding to these places.
The list, which was reportedly full of misspellings, was removed from the DHS website June 1 after receiving backlash for confusingly including localities that voted for President Donald Trump and appear to support the administration’s immigration policies, as well as from the National Sheriffs’ Association, The Associated Press and Reuters both reported.
“It was just the normal posturing from this administration,” Supervisor Bruce Gibson told The Tribune. “It seems to have come and gone.”
However, it is unclear what the list’s removal means, and it appears the list and its implications have not totally gone away.
Over the weekend, thousands of members of the National Guard descended on Los Angeles — also considered a sanctuary jurisdiction — at the direction of Trump to control protests that broke out over ICE operations across the city. The troops were deployed without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request or support — the first time a president has done so since 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the National Guard to Alabama to protect civil rights marchers.
The action followed a request from Homeland Security last month for 20,000 National Guard troops to deploy across the country to support immigration enforcement, The New York Times first reported.
According to an NPR report Friday, a U.S. official said Homeland Security officials have continued to refer to “sanctuary cities,” in meetings with the Pentagon when discussing where to send the National Guard.
“These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a news release announcing the now-removed list. “We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law.”
“President Trump and I will always put the safety of the American people first,” she said. “Sanctuary politicians are on notice: Comply with federal law.”
The questions remains: What does this mean for SLO County? The Tribune looked into the issue as part of its Reality Check series.
Is SLO County a sanctuary jurisdiction?
The list was taken offline on June 1, but the internet archive website Wayback Machine shows the full version, as published on May 31, included San Luis Obispo city and county.
The list comes in the wake of recent reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in Santa Barbara County — which was also on the list — and the arrest of Briant Reyes Estrada in SLO County, the undocumented immigrant man who allegedly left his son in a hot car, leading to his son’s death.
According to city spokesperson Whitney Szentesi, San Luis Obispo has never declared or proclaimed itself as a sanctuary city.
“We do not obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws,” she told The Tribune.
SLO County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said the same of the county, but noted that state sanctuary law supersedes local labels.
“San Luis Obispo County is not a sanctuary county. The Board of Supervisors has never declared it so. Legislators in Sacramento declared California a sanctuary state by passing the TRUST and TRUTH Acts,” he told The Tribune in a recent statement.
The TRUST, TRUTH and Values acts are state laws that “severely curtail” how California police can communicate and cooperate with federal immigration enforcement agents, Parkinson said.
On a local level, ICE agents are “pretty much on their own,” he said.
“There’s nothing in the federal statutes … that requires us to assist ICE,” Parkinson previously told The Tribune in January. “There are statutes that say we can’t conceal somebody from them. In other words, we can’t hide them from them, but we cannot cooperate with them under the TRUST and TRUTH Act.”
Under the Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools (TRUST) Act, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2013, local law enforcement can only detain immigrants if they’ve been convicted of serious or violent felonies, not based on immigration status alone.
Hand-in-hand with the TRUST Act, the 2017 Transparent Review of Unjust Transfers and Holds (TRUTH) Act requires law enforcement to notify undocumented immigrants who are in jail when ICE agents ask for their release date and grants inmates the right to remain silent and decline in-custody interviews with immigration control agents.
“Local law enforcement hasn’t been able to enforce immigration law for years,” Parkinson said in January. “ ... There’s nothing we could do or be even told to do by California government to hinder them from doing their job, but with what California has put in place, we cannot assist them on going up and picking up people. (We) could not cooperate with giving them information.”
Passed in the same year, the Values Act named California a “sanctuary state” for non-criminal undocumented immigrants and further restricted local authorities from sharing information about individuals’ immigration status with federal authorities, unless the person had been convicted of a serious crime.
Notably, it also ended local law enforcement’s ability to honor federal immigration detainers, which historically were used by ICE to ask police to hold undocumented people in custody who were otherwise eligible for release. The act, along with a federal judge’s ruling, required undocumented immigrants to be allowed bail like any other person with limited exceptions for certain serious or violent felony convictions.
Though SLO County does not have any local laws declaring it a sanctuary jurisdiction, the state TRUTH, TRUST and Values Acts extend over all California counties.
However, the Values Act only names California a sanctuary state for non-criminal immigrants — state law does not extend sanctuary to undocumented immigrants with serious criminal offenses.
The Trump administration has claimed to focus its immigration crackdown on criminals, but the Homeland Security list still went after sanctuary states like California that do not protect criminal undocumented immigrants.
On Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem commented on what qualified certain areas for placement on the agency’s “sanctuary jurisdictions” list.
“Some of the cities have pushed back,” Noem said. “They think because they don’t have one law or another on the books that they don’t qualify, but they do qualify. They are giving sanctuary to criminals because they are not backing up our ICE officers. Because they are not out there honoring detainers, they are not letting us know when these dangerous criminals are being released from their courthouses, and it’s making it much more difficult for us to ensure that these individuals that have broken our laws, that have perpetuated violence, are brought to justice and are gotten out of our country.”
California’s laws explicitly prohibit these activities, and federal law does not require them. The only federal directions on immigration policy under the Trump administration have come in the form of executive orders, which are not the same thing as federal law.
District Attorney Dan Dow noted that “immigration laws are federal, not local.”
“They are critically important because they are the law of our land that was established by the founders who wrote our Constitution and our elected representatives who wrote our statutes,” he told The Tribune in an email statement. “State or local attempts to regulate immigration are presumptively invalid because immigration is a matter of federal jurisdiction.”
When asked whether he considers SLO County a sanctuary jurisdiction, Dow said, “absolutely not.”
“The United States of America has always welcomed and still does welcome immigrants to come and become part of our beautiful melting pot of Americans,” he said later in his statement. “Anyone desiring to come here should be expected to respect that we are a nation of laws and to show us that respect by following our legal process to enter the country lawfully. Anyone here as a guest that commits a criminal offense should lose their privilege to stay in our country.”
County spokesperson Jeanette Trompeter told The Tribune that “the county of San Luis Obispo will comply with all valid state and federal laws concerning immigration enforcement.”
What state laws do not prohibit are criminal arrest warrants for undocumented people who may be in County Jail.
Parkinson said he would respect any arrest warrant signed by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney U.S. Bill A. Essayli for the Central California district, which covers SLO County.
Essayli has recently been targeting state sanctuary policies, claiming they protect criminal undocumented immigrants. On March 19, his office launched an initiative to “neutralize” sanctuary state policies, called Operation Guardian Angel.
According to Fox News, it is a task force made up of agents from ICE, Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Border Patrol and other agencies who were instructed to scan a criminal database daily to identify arrested undocumented immigrants that the Department of Justice could charge with felony illegal-reentry and write warrants for.
“I believe it is entirely appropriate for the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles to seek criminal warrants signed by a federal judge for those in our jails. We can and will honor any arrest warrant issued by a federal judge,” Parkinson said in a recent statement. “If ICE can’t go into our jail, they will be forced to go into neighborhoods and businesses to find them, and that is fundamentally wrong.”
This story was originally published June 10, 2025 at 10:45 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to include comments from SLO County District Attorney Dan Dow.
