By David A. Myers Retired Commander, San Diego Sheriff’s Office
April 30, 2026 (El Cajon) — This week, El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells stood outside City Hall with a Trump operative at his shoulder and announced that his city is suing the State of California to gut SB 54, the California Values Act. He called it “one of the most important days of my life.”
Read that again. The most important day in the life of the mayor of one of America’s largest refugee resettlement cities is not a budget that lifts a working family out of poverty. Not a Chaldean kid sworn in as a citizen. Not a public-safety win his officers can be proud of. It is a press conference attacking the law that protects his own neighbors.
That single sentence is the indictment.
El Cajon is home to tens of thousands of Iraqi Chaldeans — Aramaic-speaking Christians who fled Saddam Hussein and ISIS — alongside Syrian, Afghan, Somali, and Latino families. It has the highest poverty rate in East County. It is precisely the kind of community a serious mayor would spend every waking hour trying to lift.
Wells has spent his time, instead, methodically dismantling the trust those residents have in their own local government, one cynical stunt at a time.
The lawsuit, drafted by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, argues that California’s drivers’ license access and workplace protections amount to felony “human smuggling.” It is a press release dressed up as a pleading. The Ninth Circuit upheld SB 54 in 2019 against the first Trump administration. The Supreme Court refused to take it. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s response: El Cajon “should prepare for another loss.” Taxpayers will foot the bill.
This is not a one-time misstep.
Wells has repeatedly told the public that California is “threatening” El Cajon officers with criminal charges for following SB 54. The claim is false. El Cajon’s own police chief, Jeremiah Larson, said so on the record: “We do not believe California is threatening felony charges for violations of SB 54.” A mayor who lies to his own officers — and forces his chief to publicly correct him — is not running a city. He is running a grift.
He has handed El Cajon’s license plate reader data to police in more than 20 states. KPBS found that out-of-state agencies searched it 574 times between January and July 2025, using terms including “immigration” and “ICE assist.” Wells called the privacy concerns a “liberal fantasy.” The records — his city’s own records — say otherwise.
And the claim that this is about removing dangerous criminals collapses on the data. ICE arrested 17 people in El Cajon in the first seven months of 2025. Only four had criminal convictions. At Otay Mesa Detention Center, more than 80 percent of detainees have no criminal record at all.
SB 54 exists because every credible police chief knows that when undocumented residents fear a 911 call ends in deportation, the calls stop. Witnesses disappear. Cases go unsolved.
The City Council should rescind the January 2025 cooperation resolution. The Police Department should terminate out-of-state ALPR access immediately and publish three years of query logs. And voters should remember that a mayor who has lost the trust of his refugees, his immigrant workers, and his own police chief has no business deciding who in this city gets to feel safe at home.
El Cajon’s immigrants did not come here to be a punchline in someone else’s culture war. The least their mayor can do is stop helping the people trying to hurt them.
The opinions in this editorial reflect the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of East County Magazine. To submit an editorial for consideration, contact editor@eastcountymagazine.org