Sheriff Kelly Martinez, protector of who exactly?

San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez is a politician dressed in a badge, pretending to uphold the law while peddling fear and dodging accountability.

On Tuesday, in a move as predictable as the sunrise, she declared herself above the will of the people she supposedly serves, all in the name of bending the knee to ICE—Trump’s personal deportation squad.

San Diego County supervisors made their decision clear: local resources would not be wasted tearing apart families, eroding trust, or doing the dirty work of an administration obsessed with turning immigration into a boogeyman. Nora Vargas, who joined two other Democrats on the board of supervisors to approve the policy, stood up for humanity, common sense, and the notion that maybe, just maybe, local cops should focus on local crime rather than becoming a second-string Border Patrol.

Tuesday morning, the county supervisors—a bunch of elected officials who somehow remembered their job was to serve the people—voted to stop playing bagman for Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It was a reasonable move: don’t let local cops get used as muscle for federal immigration crackdowns that rip apart families and bury community trust. Three out of five supervisors thought this was a no-brainer.

Enter Sheriff Kelly Martinez, the defiant lawmaker in uniform. Hours after the vote, she basically told the board to go pound sand. “They don’t set policy for me,” she said, like some high school principal who just discovered TikTok. And with that, she stuck her badge in the faces of every immigrant family in the county and said, “I don’t answer to you.”

What Martinez really means is that she’s perfectly fine with doing ICE’s dirty work. Never mind that ICE has enough funding to build itself a fortress but not enough decency to stop separating families. Never mind that California, in its infinite wisdom, passed laws to curb these very abuses. And never mind that people voted for supervisors like Nora Vargas precisely because they wanted someone to protect their neighbors from the federal government’s clumsy boot.

Oooooh, scary. Migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas, in March 2019./Eric Gay

Martinez doesn’t see neighbors

Martinez sees “loopholes” to exploit and legal cover to hide behind. Her office claimed that current state law “strikes the right balance” between cooperating with ICE and ensuring public safety. Balance? What balance? The only thing balanced here is the sheriff’s stance between political expedience and outright cruelty.

This isn’t just about one sheriff in one county. This is about what happens when the people we elect—or, worse, the ones who get elected on autopilot—forget who they work for. Martinez, for all her “nonpartisan” posturing, sounds more like an ICE flack than a Democrat. That’s a great gig if you’re angling for a Fox News segment, but it’s a lousy deal for San Diego’s 3.3 million residents.

And let’s not kid ourselves: Trump’s ICE is desperate for enablers. Their deportation machine runs on fear, and without sheriffs like Martinez to play along, the gears grind slower. ICE wants jails to be detention centers and deputies to act as immigration agents. Martinez knows this, and she’s ready to oblige.

Meanwhile, the supervisors are left holding the bag, trying to explain to their constituents why the sheriff would rather take orders from Washington than from the community she serves. Nora Vargas called it a loophole, and she’s right. It’s the kind of loophole that screams “we don’t care” louder than any press release ever could.

And what does Martinez care about? Apparently, not much beyond currying favor with folks like Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who blames “sanctuary laws” for every crime since Cain whacked Abel. Never mind the facts. Never mind that Homan’s rhetoric has been debunked more times than a flat-earther’s blog. For people like Martinez and Homan, truth is a casualty of convenience.

So here we are. The people of San Diego voted for a board that said no to complicity, no to cruelty, no to being ICE’s errand boy. And they got a sheriff who responded by saying yes—to herself.

Sheriff Martinez, you don’t have to listen to the county supervisors. But you do have to listen to the people. And someday soon, they’re going to remind you that even a sheriff is just another public servant with a badge—until they take it away