The program, known as Operation Stonegarden, is administered by the Department of Homeland Security and distributes an average of $11 million a year to California law enforcement agencies that partner with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its Border Patrol division on border security missions. Dozens of agencies across the state have tapped the grant over the years, including UC San Diego’s police department, which had participated since roughly 2012.

Reporting in February detailed how campus police used the grant money to patrol stretches of coastline near La Jolla in coordination with federal border agents. The revelation sparked swift backlash among students, many of whom said the arrangement put undocumented and international students at risk simply by association. By late February, students had flooded campus officials with emails and organized a public rally, prompting Police Chief Lamine Secka to agree, in a private meeting, to pull the department out of the grant program, according to student organizer Aryan Dixit.

University spokesperson Melinda Battenberg would not directly confirm that campus police had withdrawn from the program. However, internal emails from March, reviewed by CalMatters, show that Vice Chancellor Niraj Dangoria told a retired university employee and longtime advocate for Chicano education issues that the university intended to stop drawing on the grant and had no plans to reapply. A lieutenant with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, which oversees Stonegarden operations locally, later confirmed to CalMatters that UC San Diego would not take part in future rounds of funding.

Word spread fast on campus. Daniel Negrete, a fourth-year business economics student, said he was stunned to learn his university had any working relationship with the Border Patrol.

“I was surprised the university let this happen,” Negrete said. “There’s no way someone in upper administration didn’t know about this.”

Students who took part in a Feb. 18 walkout against Immigration and Customs Enforcement also called out the university’s ties to Homeland Security, according to the student newspaper, The UCSD Guardian.

Operation Stonegarden, created in 2006, is meant to strengthen cooperation between local and federal law enforcement on border security, according to a 2025 grant document, and requires regular information-sharing meetings and reporting between agencies. But the program has long drawn scrutiny from privacy advocates and raised questions about compliance with California’s sanctuary state law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation urged President Donald Trump to eliminate the program entirely in a 2025 memo, arguing that surveillance technology companies have incentives to push police departments into the program so they’ll purchase their products.

UC San Diego police sergeant Patrick Dobbins, who served as the university’s Stonegarden coordinator, told CalMatters in November 2025 that the grant covered overtime pay for officers running border patrols and was intended to support public health and safety.

Since 2020, Homeland Security has directed grant recipients to prioritize training officers to act as immigration enforcement agents — despite the fact that doing so is illegal under California’s sanctuary law. That directive became the grant’s overarching priority in both 2025 and 2026, according to federal grant documents.

In his March email, Dangoria wrote that UC San Diego’s Stonegarden funds were used “for operations focused on drug trafficking and human trafficking, not immigration enforcement.”

Still, Negrete pointed to a 2025 audit by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General that found only 15% of Stonegarden funds nationally go toward drug interdiction efforts, with the department itself describing drug seizures as merely “incidental” to the program’s operations.

“The idea that this is some innocent program that’s just about getting drugs off the street isn’t true,” Negrete said.

In Riverside County, the majority of traffic stops tied to Stonegarden operations in 2023 and 2024 by sheriff’s deputies resulted in intelligence-gathering rather than drug seizures or arrests, according to activity reports obtained by CalMatters through public records requests. Other law enforcement agencies declined to release similar reports, claiming they become federal property once logged into the Homeland Security Information Network. Battenberg said UC San Diego police can view such reports but cannot access them once they’re submitted to Homeland Security, and did not say whether the university would release its own reports through public records requests.

Dixit, an economics and cognitive science student who at the time served as associate vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in student government and led the Student Civil Liberties Union, first emailed Chief Secka on Feb. 17 requesting a meeting to discuss “critical student concerns” about the grant. He said he never got a response.

A week later, the Student Civil Liberties Union teamed up with the Ellis Collective, a research group led by Negrete, and announced a rally for Feb. 26 protesting the police department’s acceptance of Homeland Security funding. That announcement, Dixit said, prompted Secka to agree to a private sit-down the day before the demonstration. During that meeting, Dixit said, Secka told him the department would suspend its involvement in Stonegarden and not reapply the following year.

Secka did not respond to multiple interview requests from CalMatters.

About 100 students showed up to the Feb. 26 rally anyway, with speakers denouncing the university’s longstanding cooperation with federal immigration authorities, according to The UCSD Guardian.

San Diego State University’s police department also received Stonegarden funding back in 2013, when Secka served as interim police chief there. The school hasn’t appeared in funding documents since. A spokesperson for SDSU police said those funds were used for drug interdiction efforts.

Meanwhile, other agencies continue to participate in the program, which is only growing. California’s overall Stonegarden allocation increased from $12.1 million in 2025 to $13.4 million for 2026, according to federal grant records. As of 2025, sheriff’s departments in 11 counties receive funding — Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Monterey, San Mateo, San Bernardino and Imperial. Dozens of smaller police departments have joined as well, alongside state agencies such as the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Parks and Recreation.

In fiscal year 2024, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Interagency Task Force, known as LA IMPACT, joined Stonegarden. The task force investigates serious crimes, particularly narcotics trafficking, and maintains some of the state’s most extensive surveillance resources, according to the state Attorney General’s office. It includes roughly 75 sworn officers from 48 local and state law enforcement agencies — a full roster that had not previously been made public. Michael Burke, LA IMPACT’s executive director, told CalMatters the task force’s Stonegarden activities are limited strictly to drug trafficking investigations in Los Angeles.

UC San Diego police had made no public statement about the grant until March, when a coalition of local educators called the San Diego Chicano/Latino Concilio on Higher Education, which advocates for Latino student success, pressed Chancellor Pradeep Khosla directly by email.

Patrick Velasquez, the coalition’s co-chair, argued that Stonegarden pulls police resources away from campus safety while enabling the purchase of surveillance equipment such as search cameras and data-collection devices. He noted that Dobbins had told CalMatters that campus officers don’t enforce immigration law directly but instead use border patrols to search for migrants crossing by boat. Velasquez also raised concerns that civilians can’t obtain information about Stonegarden operations from local police, and pointed to a 2025 Imperial County grant document that encourages officers to detain any suspected “criminal aliens” — raising fears that Latino students could be targeted based on appearance or language. The coalition demanded the university exit the program entirely, Velasquez wrote.

In his March 4 response, reviewed by CalMatters, Dangoria confirmed the police department would not reapply for the grant and said campus police have followed a decade-old University of California policy barring officers from working with ICE or detaining people based on suspected immigration status.

Dobbins had told CalMatters in 2025 that UC San Diego had participated in Stonegarden every year since about 2012. But Dangoria wrote in his email that campus police hadn’t actually taken part in Stonegarden activities since 2024 — a claim the university’s communications team corroborated. A 2024 funding agreement 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 could still apply for other Homeland Security grants unrelated to immigration enforcement, since the department oversees numerous federal agencies, including FEMA, which administers Stonegarden.

“I want to reiterate that UC San Diego is deeply committed to cultivating and maintaining a safe and welcoming campus environment for all members of our community, regardless of immigration status,” Dangoria wrote.

Original source: CalMatters

The post University of California Cuts Ties with Border Patrol Following Student Protests appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

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

The post Under Student Pressure, California University Ends Partnership With Border Patrol appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

With the back-to-back one-point wins, the Terriers improve to 11-5. They overcame a 1-4 performance in doubles by capturing eight of the 12 available singles points, including seven in straight sets.

Sophomore Corey Craig (#1), sophomore Alejandro Licea (#2) and senior Ben Letzer (#6) all went a perfect 2-0 in their respective singles matches to lead the way.

BU will next compete in a doubleheader against UC San Diego with action slated to begin at 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET.

Boston University – 4, UC Riverside – 3

SINGLES
1) Corey Craig (BU) def. Roth (UCR): 6-2, 6-0
2) Alejandro Licea (BU) def. Lamy (UCR): 6-3, 6-4
3) Jonah Dickson (BU) def. Suarez (UCR): 7-6(4), 7-6(4)
4) DeGrande (UCR) def. Gustavs Dambins (BU): 7-5, 3-6, 6-4
5) Sane (UCR) def. Dion Loutas (BU): 6-1, 6-4
6) Ben Letzer (BU) def. Hyunh (UCR): 1-6, 7-6(6), 6-2

DOUBLES
1) Johann Sajonz / Licea (BU) led Roth/Lamy (UCR): 5-4
2) Sane/Hyunh (UCR) def. Dickson / Adrian Pawlowski (BU): 6-3
3) Suarez/DeGrande (UCR) def. Craig / Jakob Esterowitz (BU): 6-3

Boston University – 4, Redlands – 3

SINGLES
1) Corey Craig (BU) def. Calixto (UR): 6-0, 6-1
2) Alejandro Licea (BU) def. Nir (UR): 6-3, 6-4
3) Anderson (UR) def. Gustavs Dambins (BU): 7-6(4), 3-6, 1-0(7)
4) Marcanth (UR) def. Dion Loutas (BU): 6-2, 6-3
5) Jose Maria Robalino (BU) def. Ledwith (UR): 6-1, 6-3
6) Ben Letzer (BU) def. Nbuyen (UR): 6-1, 6-4

DOUBLES
1) Calixto/Nir (UR) def. Johann Sajonz / Licea (BU): 7-6(4)
2) Robalino / Adrian Pawlowski (BU) def. Abarca/Ledwith (UR): 6-1
3) Anderson/Fanshawe (UR) def. Craig/Jakob Esterowitz (BU): 6-3

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