A $12 Million Vote for ICE That Marni Von Wilpert Doesn't Want You to Remember
While hundreds of San Diegans pleaded for protection from ICE surveillance, their councilmember signed the check and called their fears theoretical.
WASHINGTON — The meeting in San Diego had been going six hours when Marni Von Wilpert finally spoke.
Six hours. Hundreds of people. Mothers and neighbors and organizers who had taken the bus, gotten off work early, found a babysitter — all of them standing up one at a time to say the same thing in different ways: don’t do this to us.
Von Wilpert listened. Then she voted yes anyway.
“I cannot, in good conscience, take away a factual, evidential tool to prevent crimes and keep San Diegans safe on the theoretical possibility that this government — which is doing atrocious things, I agree — could access our data.”
Theoretical.
That was December 9, 2025. By then, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department had already been caught conducting searches on behalf of ICE and sharing license plate data with Customs and Border Protection agents — in violation of California sanctuary law. The state of Illinois had formally accused Flock Safety, the surveillance contractor, of handing data to the Department of Homeland Security in violation of state law. Flock admitted it. ICE officials had already tapped into Flock cameras more than 4,000 times through local police departments that had no business doing their dirty work.
None of that was theoretical. All of it was in the newspapers.
Von Wilpert voted for the $12 million contract anyway. The vote was 5-3. She was a yes.
Now she is running for Congress in California’s 48th District, where Republican Rep. Darrell Issa just announced his retirement and Democrats smell a pickup. And somewhere between December and January — forty-eight days, to be exact — Von Wilpert discovered that ICE was bad, actually.
“Reckless tactics,” she started calling them. In January.
By March, after Kristi Noem got pushed out of DHS, Von Wilpert put out a press release. It said she had “been leading the charge in San Diego against ICE’s reckless tactics.”
Leading the charge.
The civic coordinator from Alliance San Diego had stood at that microphone in December and said it plainly: “A vote to continue Flock contracts puts more San Diegans at risk of being harmed by a federal administration that is focused on targeting and criminalizing our communities. There is no real way to protect our data from getting in the hands of federal immigration enforcement with Flock.”
Von Wilpert heard that. Then she voted yes.
When a Democratic primary challenger recently raised her Flock record, Von Wilpert did not apologize. She did not say she had been wrong, or that she hadn’t known, or that she wished she could take it back.
She said: “There’s worse out there.”
She said: “You’re already being tracked.”
That is the argument of a person who has run out of better arguments. It is the argument of a tollbooth operator who, when caught letting cars through without paying, says: Look, people speed on the highway too.
The mailers going out to voters in CA-48 portray Marni Von Wilpert as a champion for immigrants.
The votes are public record.
Six hours of testimony. Hundreds of people. A contractor caught sharing data with ICE. A sheriff’s department caught doing ICE’s bidding illegally. A state suing Flock Safety in open court.
And one councilmember who called all of it theoretical, signed the check for $12 million, and forty-eight days later started calling herself the one who led the charge.
In San Diego, the license plate readers are still running.
unbelievable