Santa Clara County, San Jose propose 'ICE-free zones' amid Trump's immigration crackdown

Grace Hase, Bay Area News Group on Oct 21, 2025

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As President Donald Trump’s renews his threats to send the National Guard to the Bay Area, Santa Clara County and San Jose are proposing “ICE-free zones” that would prohibit immigration enforcement activity to take place on county or city-owned property.

It’s the latest act of resistance against the Trump administration from a county where more than 40% of residents are foreign-born and one in five immigrants are undocumented, according to county estimates.

Since Trump took office in January, the county — and its largest city — have pledged to protect its immigrant communities, filing lawsuits against the federal government over its attempts to restrict funding to ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions and spending on programs like “know your rights” trainings and immigration legal services. San Jose last month also instituted a policy that requires federal agents to remove face coverings while conducting immigration enforcement operations within the city.

The latest initiative, which stems from the “ICE-free zones” instituted earlier this month in Chicago, is being led by Supervisor Sylvia Arenas from the county and Councilmembers Peter Ortiz, Domingo Candelas and Rosemary Kamei from the city. Both the county and the city have long held non-cooperation policies that prevent officers from aiding federal agents in immigration enforcement efforts.

“This is really in the spirit of standing with our community and letting our community know that we want to make sure that we are not somehow inadvertently responsible in helping carry out some of the immigration enforcement activities,” Arenas said at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday afternoon.

The supervisor, whose district includes parts of San Jose, Morgan Hill and Gilroy, is asking officials to identify a list of county-owned or controlled properties that could “potentially be used for immigration enforcement staging, processing or surveillance.” The proposal, which was unanimously approved by the board, also wants signage posted on those properties that notifies the public that immigration enforcement activities are barred on the site.

The San Jose City Council’s rules committee is expected to vote on whether to move its own proposal forward on Wednesday afternoon.

Ortiz, who represents East San Jose on the City Council, said at a press conference on Tuesday that the effort started with a “simple but powerful idea: that city property, property built and maintained by the people, should only be used for city or county purposes.”

“When immigrant families see federal agents parked outside of our community centers, it doesn’t just create fear, it creates barriers to education, to health care, to housing assistance, to the very services that help families survive in this Valley,” he said. “That’s not who we are as a city, and that’s not what our public spaces have been created for.”

Similarly, the city proposal authored by Ortiz, Candelas and Kamei asks city officials to compile its own list of owned and operated properties “that are open space with publicly accessible parking lots that could be misused for non-city purposes.”

The proposals have already garnered support from immigrant rights advocates who maintain that the initiative will help protect the county’s diverse communities.

Jeremy Barousse, the director of policy at the nonprofit Amigos de Guadalupe, urged the board during the meeting “to pass a strong policy that excludes federal immigration enforcement from using county property to execute their harmful family separation agenda.”

“This is our community and we must not let malicious federal agents use local government property to violate the constitutional rights and safety of our people,” he said. “Our county is a beautiful place that thrives due to the vibrant contributions of our immigrant communities, and we must protect this diversity and our community with a powerful unifying partnership across the county that asserts ‘hands off’ our communities.”

In the meantime, Santa Clara County is continuing its work to ensure it protects its immigrant communities in the event Trump sends the National Guard to the Bay Area like he recently did in Los Angeles. Deputy County Executive David Campos assured the board that “no one is more prepared” than Santa Clara County.

“As scary as it is, and we feel a lot of anxiety, we’re actually ahead of the curve in terms of where other Bay Area governments are, and as a region the Bay Area is certainly looking to be more prepared than LA County was,” Campos said. “My objective and the objective of the administration is to make sure we are as prepared as we can be.”

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