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 Departme…