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Retired probation officer Diana Salcedo had downsized to a home in Imperial’s Paseo del Sol neighborhood and was looking forward to a new chapter in her life caring for her mother and young grandchildren.
Then Salcedo found out about a proposal to build what could be California’s largest data center across the street. The more she learned about how data centers affect energy, water and quality of life for those living nearby, the more upset she became.
“I was so angry,” she said. “I even cried.”
That outrage inspired Salcedo, 65, a Republican who supports President Donald Trump, to join a grassroots movement of local residents fighting the proposed Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing LLC data center. The plan, which Imperial County officials voted to clear the way for in April, calls for a nearly 1-million-square-foot data center on parcels of unincorporated land just outside of Imperial, a city of about 22,000 people less than 15 miles from the U.S-Mexico border.
Salcedo is now part of a diverse new coalition of residents in California’s southeasternmost county that is harnessing anger over data centers into organizing around the November election in hopes of creating lasting change. She and others across Imperial County have begun writing letters and emails to politicians and showing up at meetings, sometimes for the first time in their lives. Some are running for local office themselves.
The data center “activated a lot of us”, said Victor Zazueta, a retired librarian who on a September evening attended a letter-writing gathering in nearby El Centro. It was organized by Imperial Valley Get Organized!, or IVGO!, a new community group that is campaigning against incumbents on the county Board of Supervisors who supported the data center and supporting candidates for local elected office who prioritize the well-being of residents.
The group of about 20 people gathered in a large meeting room at the back of the El Centro Police Activities League recreation center and included college students, retirees and residents from El Centro to Bombay Beach. The group formed only a few months ago and has encouraged candidates to run for El Centro City Council, the Imperial Valley Healthcare District and Seeley Union School District Board of Trustees in November’s election.
Salcedo, for her part, said she will not support Imperial County Board of Supervisors incumbents John Hawk or Jesus Eduardo Escobar, who both voted in favor of merging land parcels to allow the data center to move forward. Hawk, who did not respond to an emailed request for comment, is running against Patricia Lizarraga, and Escobar is running against Enrique “Kiki” Alvarado in November’s election. Both Lizarraga and Alvarado have said they will only consider supporting future data centers that have gone through environmental reviews.
Escobar now says that his vote was a mistake. He said in an interview that he recognizes how upset constituents are about the data center project, with public outrage at county meetings at a level he had not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s somewhat of a different flavor, because before it was blue against red for the most part. Not 100%, but for the most part,” Escobar said. “And now it seems that they’re united.”
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The groundswell of community organizing in Imperial County mirrors the opposition that has sprouted in communities across the United States, bringing people together across political party lines and other divisions against AI data centers in a way that few other issues have.
Data centers have become a clear target for community organizing across the country because “people can actually see, like, ‘Oh, I’m upset about this thing, and there’s a very clear concrete thing to do about it, which is to try to get this blocked, to try to get this shut down,’” said Ben Green, an assistant professor of information and public policy at the University of Michigan.
Many of the projects are being proposed for or built in rural areas, where there may be more land and infrastructure, but where there are also smaller communities in which people tend to know each other and government officials aren’t just anonymous figures, Green said.
There is a sense among such residents that local governments are there to protect citizens and that they generally care about residents’ well-being, he said. That changed with data centers.
“‘Who’s going to protect us if we don’t just get up and do it ourselves?’ is what people are now asking themselves,” Green said. “I think that’s what drives a lot of the organizing.”
There is also a political reality in a county of only about 180,000 people where elections can be won or lost by just a few hundred votes and small numbers of people can actually make a difference, whether it’s at public meetings or the ballot box.
“It isn’t that hard to change the local government, which would be impossible to do in Los Angeles or San Diego without having a lot of money to inform a lot of people,” said Andra Dakota, a resident of Slab City near the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, who showed up to an IVGO! meeting last month.
The current county supervisors should be very worried about the upcoming elections, she said, because they aren’t representing people’s interests: access to clean air and water, affordable homes, and a healthy environment in which to raise families. “We don’t want to be sold off to data centers and corporations,” she said. “We are interested in our people.”
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Salcedo started speaking out against the data center late last year at Imperial County Board of Supervisors meetings, something she had never done before in her decades living in the county.
“You guys have to remember these are our homes!” Salcedo told supervisors at a January meeting while pounding her chest. “You are taking this away from us.”
When it comes to Trump’s support for data center development in communities like hers, she said later, “He screwed up on this one.”
Now, she said, when she gets mailers from Republican politicians asking her for donations, she sends them back not with money but with a note saying, “I’m not giving you guys a penny until you guys resolve this issue with the AI data centers.”
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The Imperial County Board of Supervisors has received the brunt of the backlash over data centers since it allowed the project to move forward. For months, heated public comment has dominated board meetings. At a March meeting, resident chants drowned out a presentation by Sebastian Rucci, the developer behind the proposed data center in Imperial. He ultimately left the meeting, and an angry crowd followed him to his car. Rucci’s company, Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, did not respond to a request for comment.
Outraged residents have demanded an environmental review of the project, which would be built near homes and schools and have a large energy footprint. They questioned how the data center’s energy needs would be met when the local power grid already struggles on hot summer days. As the climate has warmed due to climate change, Imperial County’s infamous summer heat has become longer and more severe, leading to more frequent requests for residents to conserve energy.
When Imperial resident Christopher Scurries learned of the proposed data center, his first thoughts were about how it might affect his family. He worried that the family’s home value could plummet and that the quiet of his residential neighborhood in the Victoria Ranch development would be filled with an industrial hum.
“I admit I felt maybe a little bit selfish at first,” he said.
He grew concerned about the environmental effects of data centers and the ethical uses of artificial intelligence and started the group Not in My Backyard, Imperial that aims to educate the community about the data center proposal through social media posts.
Until large data centers can operate ethically, Scurries said, he won’t support them in any communities.
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As in other parts of the country, many government officials in Imperial County initially viewed data centers as an opportunity for economic growth and a source of tax revenue. County officials heard the optimistic predictions about other industries and Imperial County became one of the leading producers of renewable energy in the state as a result. But jobs that were promised did not materialize on a large scale, and the county’s unemployment rate remains one of the highest in the state.
Residents have voiced increasing skepticism about new industries such as lithium extraction and data centers, which were held up as future economic boons for Imperial County.
Gilberto Manzanarez, an activist and former Calexico City Council member who works with Scurries’ NIMBY, Imperial, and other grassroots organizations, said he sees data centers as another extractive industry, just like solar and lithium projects that were also promised as a boon for the economically challenged region.
“We’re just honestly so tired of it,” he said.
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Local organizing against data centers is having effects nationwide. From Georgia to California, local officials have heard calls from residents to place moratoria or bans on data center construction.
In April, Imperial County supervisors approved a plan merging several lots of land owned by the data center developer. It was the only vote needed to allow the plan to move forward. After public backlash, they reversed course, enacting a 45-day moratorium on data centers in June. Although that moratorium was overturned in court, the county board again approved a moratorium at the beginning of October. The project has been stalled since Imperial County Superior Court Judge L. Brooks Anderholt, in a separate ruling in August, found county officials had illegally allowed the project to move forward without a state environmental review.
Two supervisors, Escobar and Martha Cardenas-Singh, are pushing for a special election to allow residents to vote on the option to ban data centers on unincorporated land in Imperial County. Escobar said empowering voters to decide on the future of data centers is a way to offer transparency and accountability at a time when many residents are questioning the actions of the Board of Supervisors. Cardenas-Singh did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Meanwhile, the movement against data centers has spread throughout Imperial County. At a September meeting, dozens of people, including a local real estate agent, educators, health care professionals and local activists, filed into the City Council chambers in Calexico to urge the border city of more than 38,000 to enact a data center ban.
Many focused on the high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses in the community and the lack of benefits they see coming from a data center.
“We are in a city where we are breathing in traffic air, breathing in pollution,” local teacher Roxsanna Pacheco said. “I’m trying to stay healthy. All of our community is trying to stay healthy. We do not need a data center.”
The council approved the ban unanimously.
On a state level, a slate of new laws will also make it harder for data centers to be built in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed several bills in September that will further regulate the industry in part by requiring disclosures of any environmental effects and mandating that new projects pay for their own electrical infrastructure.
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With the Imperial County data center project stalled, groups such as IVGO! are focusing their organizing on other local issues.
At the group’s September meeting, Malik Glasgow sat at a round table with a few of his coworkers at a local nonprofit that supports individuals with disabilities and their families. With the encouragement of IVGO!, Glasgow, 33, is running for the Seeley Union School District Board of Trustees in November. Miroslava Cline, Sarah Khan Garcia, Marcie Landeros and Adriana Parga are also running for two seats in the at-large election.
Glasgow became involved in community activism through his interest in environmental health in a county that struggles with air pollution from the U.S.-Mexico border and the shrinking Salton Sea and where nearly one in four elementary school children were diagnosed with asthma. As Glasgow learned more about local health disparities, he also learned about disinvestment locally. Glasgow said he is concerned about the effects of proposed lithium extraction projects and data centers and doesn’t think economic investment should come at the cost of public health or the environment.
Instead, he sees education as a path to economic growth, and wants to start in his hometown.
“I think that I can do enough to make change there,” Glasgow said. “Impactful change.”
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For Salcedo and other residents incensed over the data center proposal, the feeling of being betrayed by their elected officials can be deeply personal, they said.
That’s especially true in a county as small as Imperial, where everyone seems to know each other and many community members have direct, personal relationships with their local government representatives, sometimes going back decades: They may have gone to high school together or attended the same church.
Salcedo, for example, knew Peggy Price years before she chaired the county Board of Supervisors when they both worked for the county. When Price asked Salcedo if she could put campaign signs in front of her house for her supervisor’s race in 2024, Salcedo said yes. She voted for Price, and so did many of her neighbors. Price did not respond to an email requesting comment.
So when Salcedo found out that Price had supported the data center proposal, it was “a slap in the face,” she said: She felt personally betrayed.
Now Salcedo is working on an effort to recall Price. That recall petition was approved by the county in October, and organizers are now collecting signatures to get it on a future ballot.
Salcedo said she will keep going to government meetings, regardless of what happens with the data center proposed near her home.
“I’m going to be paying attention now,” she said, “because I don’t trust them.”
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