UC San Diego has quietly severed its decade-long connection to a federal grant program that funded campus police assistance to U.S. Border Patrol, a reversal that came within weeks of a CalMatters report exposing the arrangement and triggering an outcry from students and faculty.
The program in question, Operation Stonegarden, is administered by the Department of Homeland Security and distributes roughly $11 million annually to California law enforcement agencies that partner with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its Border Patrol division on border security operations. UC San Diego’s police department had participated since around 2012, using the funding to patrol coastal areas near campus.
That arrangement became public knowledge on Feb. 10, when CalMatters detailed how campus officers used Stonegarden dollars to conduct border-related patrols along the shoreline. The revelation ignited swift backlash among students, many of whom argued the partnership endangered undocumented and international students on campus. Within about two weeks, after a wave of student emails and the threat of a public demonstration, campus police Chief Lamine Secka agreed in a private meeting to withdraw from the program, according to student organizer Aryan Dixit.
University spokesperson Melinda Battenberg would not directly confirm the department’s exit from Stonegarden. But internal correspondence reviewed by CalMatters — including a March email from Vice Chancellor Niraj Dangoria to retired UC San Diego employee and Chicano education advocate Patrick Velasquez — indicated the university does not intend to reapply for the grant going forward. San Diego County Sheriff’s Lt. Michael Gonzales, whose office oversees Stonegarden operations regionally, told CalMatters in May that the university would not take part in future rounds of funding.
Word of the partnership spread rapidly across campus once it became public. Daniel Negrete, a fourth-year business economics student, said he was stunned that his university maintained any working relationship with Border Patrol. Students voiced similar frustrations during a Feb. 18 walkout protesting immigration enforcement, according to the student-run UCSD Guardian.
“I was shocked that the university was letting this happen,” Negrete said. “There’s no way that at least someone in higher administration wasn’t aware of this.”
Operation Stonegarden, established in 2006, is designed to strengthen coordination between federal and local law enforcement on border security, according to a 2025 federal grant document. Participating agencies are required to share information regularly, including through periodic meetings and mandatory reporting. Since its inception, however, the program has drawn scrutiny over privacy issues and questions about compliance with California’s sanctuary law, which restricts local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy watchdog group, urged the Trump administration last year to shut the program down entirely, warning that surveillance technology vendors use Stonegarden funding as a sales pitch to police departments.
UC San Diego police Sgt. Patrick Dobbins, who served as the university’s Stonegarden coordinator, told CalMatters in November 2025 that the grant covered officer overtime for border patrols and was intended to promote public health and safety. But Negrete pointed to a 2025 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General audit showing only about 15% of Stonegarden funds nationally go toward drug enforcement, with federal officials themselves describing drug interdiction as merely “incidental” to the program’s mission.
“The position that this is an innocent program and simply taking drugs off the streets is not true,” Negrete said.
Records obtained by CalMatters through public information requests showed that in Riverside County, the majority of Stonegarden-funded traffic stops conducted by sheriff’s deputies in 2023 and 2024 resulted in what were labeled “intel development” outcomes — even in cases where no drugs were found and no crimes were committed. Other law enforcement agencies declined to release similar reports, citing federal ownership of the records once they are logged into the Homeland Security Information Network. Battenberg said UC San Diego police can view but cannot retain such reports once submitted, and did not clarify whether the university could release its own records upon request.
Student pressure built quickly after the initial CalMatters story. On Feb. 17, Dixit — then serving as associate vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in student government and president of the Students’ Civil Liberties Union — emailed Chief Secka requesting a meeting to discuss the department’s use of Homeland Security funding. He said he never received a response.
A week later, the Students’ Civil Liberties Union partnered with the Ellis Collective, a research organization led by Negrete, to announce a campus rally set for Feb. 26 opposing the police department’s ties to Homeland Security. The day before the demonstration, Secka agreed to sit down with Dixit one-on-one. During that conversation, Dixit said, the chief confirmed the department would stop participating in Stonegarden and would not seek renewed funding. Secka did not respond to multiple interview requests from CalMatters.
Roughly 100 students turned out for the Feb. 26 rally anyway, where speakers criticized the university’s long history of cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Notably, San Diego State University’s police department also received Stonegarden funding back in 2013, a period when Secka served as that department’s interim police chief. The university does not appear in any more recent funding records. A spokesperson for SDSU police, Amanda Stills, said those funds had been used for drug interdiction work.
While UC San Diego has stepped away from the program, Stonegarden funding statewide continues to grow. Homeland Security increased California’s total allocation from $12.1 million in 2025 to $13.4 million for 2026, according to federal grant documents. Sheriff’s departments in 11 counties — including Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Imperial and others — currently receive funding, along with numerous smaller police agencies and state departments such as Fish and Wildlife and Parks and Recreation.
Among the newer participants is the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, known as L.A. IMPACT, which joined Stonegarden in fiscal year 2024. The task force, made up of about 75 officers drawn from 48 local and state agencies, focuses on major crimes including narcotics trafficking and has access to some of the state’s most sophisticated surveillance tools, according to the California Attorney General’s office. Executive Director Michael Burke told CalMatters the task force’s Stonegarden work is confined to drug trafficking investigations within Los Angeles.
As of early March, UC San Diego had issued no public statement addressing the grant controversy. That prompted the San Diego Chicano/Latino Concilio on Higher Education, an advocacy coalition, to send a direct appeal to Chancellor Pradeep Khosla. Velasquez, the group’s co-chair, argued the Stonegarden partnership diverted police resources from campus safety duties and enabled the purchase of surveillance equipment, including search cameras and data-collection devices. He also referenced Dobbins’ earlier comments that officers used the patrols to look for migrants arriving by panga boats along the coast, even though they do not enforce immigration law directly.
Velasquez further raised concerns about the public’s inability to access details on Stonegarden operations from local police, and cited a 2025 Imperial County grant document encouraging officers to detain all suspected “criminal aliens,” warning that such language could lead to Latino students being profiled based on appearance or language.
In her March 4 response, Dangoria confirmed to Velasquez that campus police would not seek renewed Stonegarden funding and reaffirmed that the department continues to follow a decade-old University of California policy prohibiting campus police from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or detaining individuals based solely on suspected immigration status.
Notably, while Dobbins told CalMatters in 2025 that UC San Diego had participated in Stonegarden every year since roughly 2012, Dangoria’s email stated that campus police had not actually taken part in Stonegarden activities since 2024 — a claim the university’s communications office later confirmed. A 2024 funding agreement reviewed by CalMatters shows those operations were slated to run from April 2025 through February 2027.
In a follow-up message to Velasquez on March 11, Dangoria noted the police department might still pursue other Homeland Security grants unrelated to immigration enforcement, pointing out that the federal department oversees numerous agencies, including FEMA, which administers Stonegarden.
“I want to reiterate that UC San Diego is deeply committed to cultivating and maintaining a campus environment that is safe and welcoming for all members of our community, regardless of immigration status,” Dangoria wrote.
Original source: CalMatters
