UC San Diego has quietly cut ties with a federal grant program that for more than a decade funneled money to campus police to help patrol the border, a decision that came weeks after questions were raised about the arrangement and student anger boiled over.
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University spokesperson Melinda Battenberg would not directly confirm that campus police had withdrawn from the program.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
