According to CalMatters Housing, UC San Diego has cut ties with Operation Stonegarden, a federal grant program run by the Department of Homeland Security that provides millions of dollars annually to law enforcement agencies across California to collaborate with Border Patrol. The university's campus police had been participating in the program since around 2012, using grant money to fund officers working overtime on border patrol operations near the coast. After CalMatters published an investigation in February revealing this decade-long partnership, students and faculty raised concerns that the arrangement put undocumented and international students at risk.
The outcry from students happened quickly and was pretty organized. A student leader named Aryan Dixit, who held a position in campus government and led the Students' Civil Liberties Union, reached out to the campus police chief in mid-February asking for a meeting about the issue. Within days, student organizations announced a planned rally for late February. According to Dixit, the police chief agreed in a one-on-one meeting to pull the department out of the grant program and not reapply in the future. Internal university emails that CalMatters reviewed confirmed the administration intended to cease participation.
What makes this story interesting from a policy standpoint is the disconnect between what the university said the grant was funding versus what critics believe it actually supports. University administrators claimed the Stonegarden money was earmarked for drug and human trafficking operations, not immigration enforcement. However, students pointed to a federal audit finding that only fifteen percent of Stonegarden funds nationally go toward drug enforcement, with immigration-related activities being the real focus. Federal records also show that Homeland Security has been pushing grant recipients since 2020 to train officers as immigration agents, which conflicts with California's sanctuary law prohibiting local police from immigration work.
The grant program itself has faced broader scrutiny beyond the UC San Diego situation. A privacy advocacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently asked the federal government to end Stonegarden entirely, noting that surveillance companies actively encourage police departments to join just so they can sell them technology. Additionally, activity reports from other counties showed that many traffic stops conducted under the program resulted in "intelligence development" rather than actual criminal charges or drug seizures, raising questions about whether these operations are truly focused on public safety.
What I'm seeing in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that students and young people are increasingly paying attention to where their universities get money and what partnerships those institutions maintain. This UC San Diego situation shows that transparent reporting about campus operations can spark real change, even when those operations have been quietly running for over a decade. For buyers and sellers in the region, universities are major anchors for our communities, and decisions like this one affect how students perceive safety and whether talented people want to attend or stay in these areas.
