Today the San Diego County Board of Supervisors votes on whether to end three agreements letting ICE and CBP train at county-owned gun ranges. It is a simple question with an obvious answer: county property should not equip the agents carrying out mass raids in our neighborhoods. And yet the loudest voices in this fight have gone quiet exactly when it counts.
CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott calls the proposed termination “reckless, irresponsible, and ignorant.” He claims Otay Mesa is the only facility available for CBP training. It isn’t.
Border Patrol runs its own separate San Diego range. The Navy has operated a firing range at Camp Michael Monsoor in East County since the 1960s. Border Patrol has built range capacity directly into its own stations. Scott knows this. He’s counting on the board — and the public — not to.
This is the playbook: manufacture a crisis, threaten economic pain, bully local government into compliance. It’s the same script Project 2025 architects wrote for federal agencies to override local resistance. Don’t let it work here.
And while Scott bullies, San Diego’s elected leadership has largely gone silent — none more conspicuously than Marni von Wilpert.
In January, running for Congress, von Wilpert demanded Escondido cancel its ICE gun range contract. She organized a petition. She called it a threat to “the Constitution and the rule of law.” She said ICE’s “chaos makes our community less safe and puts all of us in danger.”
She was right then. So where is she now, as the county prepares to terminate three agreements — a bigger fight, over the same principle, with an actual vote on the table this week?
Nothing. No statement. No pressure. No fire.
The primary is over. The cameras moved on. And the councilmember who wouldn’t stop talking about ICE’s “violence” in Escondido has nothing to say about the county doing, at scale, exactly what she demanded of a single city police department seven months ago.
That’s the reaction of a candidate who is concerned that it might cost votes before November.
The Board of Supervisors should vote to terminate these agreements. The facts support it, the alternatives exist, and the fear-mongering doesn’t hold up. But facts alone don’t move politics — pressure does. Silence from people who claim to lead is its own kind of vote, cast for the status quo.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
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