By The Navarro Report
UC San Diego is walking away from a federal grant program that funded campus police overtime for Border Patrol operations, ending a partnership that had operated quietly for roughly 14 years until student organizing and investigative reporting forced it into the open.
The program, 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 conduct patrols along the coastline near campus. HsjchronicleHsjchronicle
The partnership became public in February, when a CalMatters investigation detailed how campus officers used Stonegarden dollars to conduct border-related patrols along the shoreline, a revelation that ignited swift backlash among students who argued it endangered undocumented and international students on campus. Within about two weeks, following 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, who had led the meeting. HsjchronicleHsjchronicle
The university has been notably reticent about confirming the decision publicly. A UC San Diego spokesperson declined to confirm whether campus police had left the grant program, but internal emails sent in March from a university vice chancellor to a retired employee and community advocate, reviewed by CalMatters, confirmed the college intended to cease using the grant and had no plans to reapply. In May, a San Diego County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant who manages Stonegarden-funded operations in the region confirmed to CalMatters that the university would not be involved in future grant operations. Times of San DiegoKPBS
The program’s defenders have framed it in public-safety terms. A UC San Diego police sergeant who served as the university’s Stonegarden coordinator told CalMatters the grant covered officer overtime for border patrols and was used to promote health and safety. But critics point to federal audit data undercutting that rationale: a 2025 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General audit found only about 15 percent of Stonegarden funds nationally go toward drug enforcement, with federal officials themselves describing drug interdiction as merely “incidental” to the program’s core mission. Times of San DiegoHsjchronicle
Privacy advocates have raised concerns about the program well beyond San Diego. The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the Trump administration to end Stonegarden entirely in a 2025 memo, arguing that surveillance technology companies encourage police departments to join the program specifically to drive sales of their products. Federal guidance has also directed grant recipients to prioritize training officers as immigration agents each year since 2020 — a directive that conflicts directly with California’s sanctuary law, which prohibits state and local law enforcement from participating in federal immigration enforcement. KPBSHsjchronicle
That legal tension is precisely why UC San Diego’s decision resonates beyond campus. It arrives the same week California Attorney General Rob Bonta is fighting the Trump administration in court over IRS data-sharing with ICE — part of a broader pattern of friction between the state’s sanctuary protections and federal enforcement priorities detailed elsewhere in this report. UC San Diego’s exit from Stonegarden is a smaller, more local instance of the same underlying conflict: state and local institutions being asked, sometimes quietly, to help carry out federal immigration enforcement work that state law says they should not be doing.
For San Diego, a border community where the practical and political stakes of immigration policy are rarely abstract, the episode is likely to fuel scrutiny of other local agencies that still receive Stonegarden funding. Dozens of police departments statewide remain in the program, and the coalition of students, faculty, and advocacy groups that pushed UC San Diego to exit has signaled it intends to keep pressing elsewhere.
This article was produced under The Navarro Report’s Human-Directed AI Journalism model