Contra Costa County is not a "sanctuary county,” but plenty of residents want to make it one, and they railed against Sheriff David Livingston for honoring ICE requests on dozens of detained immigrants since Trump took office.

The East Bay cities of Concord, El Cerrito, Martinez, Richmond, and San Pablo are sanctuary cities, but they’re the only sanctuary cities in Contra Costa County. The county itself is not designated as a sanctuary county, while Alameda County and San Francisco County are. But as some aggressive ICE operations in the East Bay have residents on edge, Bay Area News Group reports on an emerging suspicion that the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office has been cooperating with ICE, which spilled out into the open at a Tuesday Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors meeting with the county's Sheriff David Livingston.

Livingston was simply joining the meeting to give his quarterly Sheriff's Oversight Report, something he does every few months, and there was nothing about ICE on Tuesday’s agenda. But both supervisors and local residents were up in arms to find that Livingston’s office had notified ICE of 55 immigrants in their custody since Trump took office, even though that’s only a 20% cooperation rate with the requests ICE made of the office.  

While he was not present at the meeting, Sheriff Livingston did join in by Zoom. And he insisted his department is handling their cooperation with ICE in the exact same way they did under the Biden administration.

“Our policies and state law prohibit direct interaction with ICE by any Sheriff’s employee. They’re not allowed into our facilities, they don’t do or conduct interviews in our facilities,” Livingston told the board. “The only interaction we have, which is fully authorized by state law, is if someone has been requested that ICE be notified upon their release, because they meet the qualifications of a serious or violent felon.”

“We will make that notification. But we do not facilitate anything beyond that,” Livingston insisted.  

Per Bay Area News Group, the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office also notified ICE of 132 individuals in their custody in 2024. So these notification rates were even higher last year under the Biden administration than they have been thus far under Trump.

But the supervisors feel we are living in a different era now.

“This is not your normal ICE, right? This is ICE on steroids with an administration that is running in a way that is authoritarian and against the law,” Supervisor John Gioia said at the meeting. “The future of our democracy is in our collective hands. Another branch of government or the courts isn’t going to solve this crisis. It’s going to be us.”

Gioia introduced a measure for more oversight of the Sheriff’s Office’s cooperation with ICE, though that measure failed. And it does not sound like Contra Costa County is going to become a sanctuary county anytime soon.

“My big concern, I will continue to articulate,” Board Chair Candace Andersen said Tuesday, “is I do not want to have a target put on our backs and have benefits stripped from the very immigrants we’re trying to protect.” She noted that even the sanctuary declaration would not “somehow stop ICE from coming into our county.”

Related: New App Lets Users Crowdsource ICE Agent Sightings, Trump Administration Goes Apoplectic [SFist]

Image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 05: Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on August 05, 2025 in New York City. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is offering new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruits signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and student loan forgiveness as the agency is seeking to meet U.S. President Donald Trump’s goal of hiring 10,000 new ICE agents and deporting a million people a year. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)