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 State Bill 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 Wells’ life, a mayor of one of America’s largest refugee resettlement cities, is not a budget that lifts a working family out of poverty, or witnessing a Chaldean kid sworn in as a citizen. It’s not a public-safety win that his officers can be proud of. It is a press conference attacking a state law that protects its own neighbors.
That last sentence is the indictment.
El Cajon is sometimes referred to as “Little Baghdad.” It is home to tens of thousands of Iraqi Chaldeans — Aramaic-speaking Christians who fled Saddam Hussein and ISIS. El Cajon’s large Chaldean population is in addition to thousands of Syrian, Afghan, Somali, and Latino families. El Cajon has the highest poverty rate in East County.
Instead of devoting his energies to lifting up El Cajon’s immigrant communities, Wells has spent his time methodically dismantling the trust those residents have in their own local government, one cynical stunt at a time.
In his latest lawsuit, drafted by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, Wells argues that California’s driver’s license access and workplace protections amount to felony “human smuggling” under federal law.
It is, to put it gently, a press release dressed up as a pleading.
In 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld SB 54 in 2019 in litigation brought by the first Trump administration. The Supreme Court then refused to take it.
Despite the court losses, Wells and his supporters are trying again.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Rob Bonta’s response to it is simple: El Cajon “should prepare for another loss.”
El Cajon taxpayers will foot the bill.
This is not a one-time misstep. It is a multi-year pattern.
Wells has repeatedly told the public that California is “threatening” El Cajon officers with criminal charges and pension loss for following SB 54. The claim is false. Bonta has said so.
More damning, El Cajon’s own police chief, Jeremiah Larson, said so on the record after city staff reviewed the law: “We do not believe California is threatening felony charges for violations of SB 54.”
A mayor who lies to his own police officers — and forces his chief to publicly correct him — is not running a city. He is running a grift.
He brought the same anti-sanctuary resolution to the council three separate times until he wore down a swing vote and squeezed it through 3–2, after a five-hour hearing in which 80 residents told him to stop.
He has handed El Cajon’s automated license plate reader data to police in more than 20 states. KPBS’s review of the city’s own Flock Safety records showed that out-of-state agencies searched El Cajon’s data 574 times between January and July 2025, using terms including “immigration,” “immigration violation,” and “ICE assist.”
Wells called the privacy concerns a “liberal fantasy.” The records — his city’s own records — say otherwise.
And the talking point that this is all about removing dangerous criminals collapses on contact with the spreadsheet. According to the Deportation Data Project, ICE arrested four people in El Cajon in 2023 — all with criminal convictions. In the first seven months of 2025, ICE arrested 17 people — only four had criminal convictions. At Otay Mesa Detention Center, more than 80 percent of detainees have no criminal record at all.
A mayor of a refugee city has two basic obligations: Keep his community safe, and keep them able to function — to call 911, to take their kids to school, to testify when they witness a crime.
SB 54 exists because every credible police chief in this state knows that when undocumented residents fear a 911 call ends in a deportation, the calls stop. Witnesses disappear. Cases go unsolved.
Wells has spent years shredding that trust in pursuit of national television hits. The city council should rescind the January 2025 cooperation resolution. The police department should immediately terminate out-of-state ALPR access and publish three years of query logs. Voters should remember that a mayor who has lost the trust of his refugees, his immigrant workers, three of his own council members, and now his own police chief, has no business deciding who in this city gets to feel safe in their 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.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service.
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