"They Will Be Arrested": In Santa Clara, an Immigrant Elected to County Supervisor Pledges Arrest and Prosecution of ICE Agents Who Violate the Law. In Marin, No One Seems To Have Considered That.
Santa Clara County Supervisor and Bronze Star Recipient Otto Lee also honored the 40 killed by ICE over the last year. His impassioned speech has sparked discussion about the role of law enforcement.
Editor’s Note: The Department of Justice released new Jeffrey Epstein files on Friday just as I was reading Japanese-American internment documents at the Bancroft Archives – a real double-feature of misery. I will be issuing a brief article about what some of the latest Epstein files reveal and how it relates to the Bay Area, as well as an update on what the Japanese internment archives can tell us about current DHS/ICE activity.
Also: MCERA was gracious enough to provide significant information about its investments; and I am working on another brief article coming summarizing MCERA’s passive investments in the companies that make the surveillance and spyware used by ICE; MCERA’s active investments in Israeli bonds; and what divestment would entail.
I. From Santa Clara County, A Bold Statement:
Last Tuesday, the President of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, Otto Lee, opened public comment with a frank and empathetic statement about the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by DHS/ICE agents. Lee then boldly stated that any ICE officers who violate the law in Santa Clara, where ICE is expected to be stationed during the February 8 SuperBowl, will be arrested and brought to trial.
I first learned of Lee’s statment on Thursday night from an initial article in the reliable San Jose Spotlight. The actual statement was much stronger than what had been reported in the Spotlight, and I provide the full recorded public comment here:
What shocked me about Supervisor Lee’s presentation was the genuine empathy and respect he demonstrated not only for Renée Good and Alex Pretti, but for all the 40 individuals known to have been killed by ICE over the last year. Lee made a point to say the name of Keith Porter, Jr., a Black Los Angeleno who was killed in his own home by an off-duty ICE officer.
In contrast I have yet to hear any of the Marin Board of Supervisors mention any of the recent or past victims of ICE. They certainly have made no statement that local law enforcement will arrest ICE agents who violate the law in Marin. (In the last two meetings, the Supervisors for the most part looked terrified that anyone from the public had brought up the matter of ICE.)
Who Is Otto Lee?
The modest Lee has an impressive C.V., with academic and service credentials that exceed what Marin County’s more powerful Supervisors bring to the table. Lee is a patent attorney who immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, graduated from UC Berkeley, then joined the U.S. Navy before entering Hastings Law. Per his official bio, Lee remained in the Navy reserves, and later served as the Chief of Drawdown Logistics Policy at the Multi-National Forces Iraq Headquarters, where he helped coordinate “the largest drawdown of troops since Vietnam.”
Lee was awarded the Bronze Star for his role in bringing 150,000 troops home to safety and closing 200 U.S. military bases in Iraq amid mortar and IED attacks.
Lee’s district is diverse, and includes the City of Milpitas, which is over 70% Asian, 13% Latino/Hispanic, and slightly under 10% white. (Milpitas’ Asian population includes a thriving Filipino-American population of over 21%, a slightly smaller Chinese-American population, and an Indian-American population of approximately 15%.)
Lee’s Asian and Latino constituents have legitimate personal concerns about being targeted by ICE, and Lee’s strong statement seems to reflect that urgency. On the list of 40 casualties of ICE activity, there were found six Asian surnames, including that of 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, a ride-share and package driver who was seized by ICE, and subsequently found hanged in a Pennsylvania detention facility used by ICE; with his hands and feet bound behind his back.
Pushback – and Admiration – for Lee’s Statement:
An elected official must not be unafraid to commit to a standard. But can Lee really make such a promise in good faith? A followup article in the San Jose Spotlight raised important questions about whether Lee may have spoken too quickly. What power, exactly, does local law enforcement have to confront DHS/ICE agents sent to terrorize and kill residents of American cities?
There is an interesting tension in the San Jose Spotlight article between the position taken by the Bronze Star veteran Otto Lee (who wants law enforcement to protect people against ICE abuses and who has been supportive of the local Palestinian community), and the position of Santa Clara’s controversial District Attorney Jeff Rosen, whose admiration for Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu has long been a matter of public record. For fact-checking purposes only, I present documentation of Rosen’s respect for the embattled Israeli Prime Minister from Drew Altizer’s site:
(Rosen also has the distinction of uniting his opposition in the 2022 campaign; the diametrically opposed challengers both asserted that Rosen had willfully tripped one of them on stage.)
But where is the support that Lee and his constituents will need from Governor Newsom, who seems more committed to lobbing empty insults at Trump than realistically addressing the threat from ICE faced by actual Californians – not to mention California’s critical farm economy?
It should be pointed out that Lee is not averse to bold positions. Like former Sonoma State University President Mike Lee, Otto Lee has demonstrated empathy for the Palestinian community and is sympathetic to their concerns. Looking at the current polling, the two Mr. Lee’s were simply early in representing the majority pro-Palestinian sentiment of their fellow Americans, including a growing number of conservative Americans.
Speaking at the 2024 Palestinian Cultural Day event, Otto Lee acknowledged that there had been requests to cancel the event due to concerns about protesters or counter-protesters. Then, with a smile, Lee, the former Naval Officer, announced with glee: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! We are doing it.” And in fact, the event went on smoothly.
Perhaps Lee’s risky gamble on January 27 was to say what Americans needed to hear: that the United States can be restored to the good and decent place Lee believes it to be and which he has worked hard to defend – if enough people stand up for what’s right.
But… what are the odds on that? Let’s take a look at Marin County as a barometer of the Democratic status quo.
II. Meanwhile, In Marin….
On January 20, a week before Otto Lee’s statement, the good, God-fearing white residents of Marin County descended upon their Board of Supervisors to demand an end to SCAAP funding that the County Sheriff receives to cooperate with ICE. The coordinated effort included the members from the Marin Organizing Committee (MOC); the DNC-adjacent Indivisible Marin; AIPAC-linked Marin DSA; and a nascent but somewhat opaque Latino organizing group.
The organized demand was, on its face, unserious: No one threatened to challenge any of the Supervisors in any upcoming races if the SCAAP funding continued; or threatened to disrupt the normal operations of local government; or to withhold taxes; or to sue. And as we have seen before, the checks will most likely to continue to flow from those who “protested” the SCAAP funding to the same SCAAP-friendly elected officials for their next campaigns.
And it was not hard to see that the demand itself served as a distraction from larger, more urgent questions regarding local law enforcement’s responsibilities to stop ICE agents who violate the law.
It’s Not Historical Amnesia If You Never Knew:
The Marin residents demanding the end to SCAAP funding at the January 20 Board of Supervisors meeting were nearly entirely white, confirming little outreach by the organizers to minority groups historically skeptical of the County’s white-dominated “activism”. Most of the speakers did not have roots in the County that went back far enough to remember the era when there were genuine, grassroots challenges to authority, including significant Black Panther Party activity out of Marin City; a year-long printers’ strike supported by Cesar Chavez against the Marin I-J in 1970; and a home-grown anti-war and later anti-nuclear arms race movement.
Notably, the January 20 Board of Supervisors meeting started with the Pledge of Allegiance led by the VFW. This is a phenomenon that has been absent from the Board meetings for years. Tellingly, none of the nonprofit-driven activist groups seemed to find it disconcerting enough to mention it; few had been in the County long enough to recall the furious and brave opposition in Marin to the loyalty oath during the McCarthy era, or later battles over the Pledge of Allegiance.
Marin Liberals Side-Step “Are We the Baddies”?
The unanimity of the requests implied a certain level of coordination: the speakers repeatedly compared ICE to the “Gestapo” and made comparisons to Nazi Germany, as if today’s livestreamed violence by ICE was somehow foreign to American shores. But as Yale Professor Greg Grandin and too many others have pointed out for years, US border patrol operations have been a “cult of brutality” since 1924, and a “frontline instrument of race vigilantism” with roots in the murderous Texas Rangers.
There is, dismally, far more American precedent for ICE’s lawless violence on U.S. soil: in the genocide of Native American people by the US military that served as a model for Nazi Germany’s own industrialized ethnic cleansing programs; in the brutal and often murderous repression of both enslaved and freed Black Africans; in murderous pogroms enacted against Chinese laborers in the Western states; and in the approximate 5,000 Latinos lynched in the US between only 1910 and 1920.
Only two speakers appeared to identify the execution and kidnappings by ICE as being rooted in anything other than “Nazism”: one compared ICE operations to the US tradition of slave-catchers and another raised the issue of the genocide of Native Americans.
Say Her Name, But Please, Not His
Multiple speakers referenced the horrific execution of Renée Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, but none would say the name of Keith Porter, Jr., shot to death by an ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. (Porter, like Good, doted on his children. Unlike Good, Porter was Black, and thus not a suitable name for Marin DSA or MOC members to mention.)
Jarringly, multiple speakers praised Minnesota officials “for taking a strong stand” when in fact officials in Minnesota had done little but posture on cable news. Was there a tell in this? It seems possible that white Marinites know that, despite the protest slogan “ICE out of Marin”, ICE is not, in relative terms, actually “in Marin”.
In fact, from all available reporting on the Israeli tech that ICE uses to select which areas to target, it is unlikely that ICE would target Marin in the same way ICE has targeted Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Maine, New York, et cetera. Marin is too white and its proximity to Governor Newsom too immediate. (Newsom’s father’s Operation Paperclip work puts the California Governor ideologically in tandem with Trump’s own Nazi-curious father).
Thus, the narrowness of the slogan “ICE out of Marin” begs the question: What location would Marin’s chest-beating white progressives prefer ICE to select?
The obvious target is across the bridge in Richmond, California.
Throughout January, Richmond’s Latino mayor, the man who balanced the city’s budget and worked with the police and community to achieve a significant reduction in violent crime, has faced repeated calls for his resignation by the Bay Area JCRC – and from Marinites like the ONDCP-funded Laurie Dubin – for alleged “antisemitism”. That constant plaint of “antisemitism”, especially when it does not apply, is going to be harder to maintain given the sheer bulk of revelations in the latest Epstein files release, but more on that later.
The “Woke” Pastors Who Remain Functionally Asleep:
The last speaker at the January 20 Marin BoS meeting was Pastor Scott Clark of the uber-progressive Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo. Clark is a former corporate atorney who later went into the rather un-Godly business of running a nonprofit that is also a church. This is something of a pattern in Marin County, with Pastor Paul Mowry of Sausalito Presbyterian Church having made the move from the financial services sector to the rhymed opacity of American religious institutions. Tellingly, over the past nearly 28 months of Israel’s US-funded genocide of Palestinians, neither pastor made any public statement to the Board of Supervisors in support of a ceasefire. Multiple attempts to ask why they had not done so were rebuffed.
In his closing public remarks at the January 20 BoS meeting, Pastor Clark dramatically vowed that the group would return if the Board didn’t put the matter of the SCAAP funding on the agenda.
Predictably, the Board didn’t agendize the matter, and, equally predictably, at the following week’s Board meeting, neither Clark nor his parishioners showed up. The TV cameras were gone, and so were those seeking its spotlight.
Conversely, approximately twelve Marin City residents and community leaders were there the following week, still fighting for their homes and their children, eight decades later. This is the moment later in the meeting when Terrie Green addressed the Board of Supervisors about the ongoing lack of a freeway barrier wall which has contributed to noise and air pollution for generations of Marin City children:
III. A Few Brief Notes In Closing
Investigative Reporter Peter Byrne has filed his tenth installment on Military AI at Project Censored and was just interviewed on Scheerpost, the audio is linked here. With everything going on, it’s great to have Scheer and Byrne walk you through what kind of AI and other tech is being used by DHS/ICE.
Retired nurse/artist/journalist/activist Kelly Hammargren wrote a great short piece on new policies for tear gas in Berkeley, linked here. Seems relevant given the way things are going!
Rose Penelope Yee, a Democrat challenging Jared Huffman in the newly reshaped District 2 race for U.S. Congress, continues to receive a warm welcome in the redder parts of the District on her “Peace Dividend” platform. Yee has issued a strong statement against ICE abuses, going so far as to state that ICE should be abolished. I hope to catch up with her soon.
One of Yee’s campaign volunteers was at the Farmer’s Market in Marin last weekend amid an Indivisible-organized protest of ICE. That volunteer was greeted warmly by protesters, but yelled at by two “Indivisible Marin” organizers who claimed that the simple distribution of polite flyers for Yee’s campaign was somehow inappropriate. (Maybe they should rename themselves “Divisible Marin”.) The attempt to shut down any and all left challenges to the severely dysfunctional status quo has been failing since 2016. You’d hope that, ten years later, everyone would have learned to stop doing that.
©2026 Eva Chrysanthe
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