San Juan Road operation not related to immigration

On Wednesday morning, law enforcement officials from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office, the California Department of Cannabis Control, the FBI and the DEA amassed at a business on the 1400 block of San Juan Road in Monterey County to serve a search warrant regarding an illegal marijuana grow.

Kevin McInerney, the Department of Cannabis Control’s northern law enforcement commander, said that officials seized a large amount of illegal marijuana and other evidence and briefly detained 21 workers before releasing them.

But McInerney stressed that the operation was not related to immigration enforcement.

The enforcement on the massive 27-acre site required the presence of three other agencies due to the size of the operation, McInerney said.

“I’m a little distraught by the fear I see in people’s faces when we show up, not understanding that not only do we not conduct immigration enforcement, but it’s illegal for us to participate in that in California,” he said. “It’s against the law.”

Still, the presence of dozens of law enforcement officials—in addition to several police vehicles including a helicopter—so alarmed the immigrant community that dozens of people either left their agricultural jobs or didn’t come in at all, causing havoc for the day in the local agricultural industry.

The owner of a local agriculture company who asked to remain anonymous said that their company was short 60 people.

“There was a huge shortage of labor out in the field today, because a lot of people took off and went home and left us without workers,” the owner said.

Watsonville Police Chief Jorge Zamora said that the belief that local police agencies cooperate with federal immigration officials has eroded the trust his department has spent decades building in the community.

“We are not ICE,” he said. “We don’t work with ICE. For us, our main goal is one to keep everyone safe, but in order to do that we have to establish trust with people, trust that quickly gets erased by one incident.”

His message to the community is clear: anyone can call the police for help without fear of being reported to federal officials.

“And you don’t have to worry about being arrested and being sent back to wherever you’re from if you’re undocumented,” he said. “Because we don’t care. That is not our mission.”

According to the city of Watsonville, ICE contacted Watsonville eight times between March 1 and June 19 to say they were conducting various operations, and each time called to report when they were finished. The federal agency did not, however, request assistance from WPD.

Zamora added that WPD takes seriously the edict that California is a sanctuary state.

“We’re not going to help [federal officials] unless we’re compelled to by the courts,” he said. “I have nothing but respect for them, but I’m not going to cooperate with them if the law doesn’t allow us to. We are here to serve and not to scare.”