Press Clips: News-Press ICE Blockbuster; Indy Must-See Retrospective; MAGA Mouthpiece Watch

Media and news industry commentary and criticism for Santa Barbara and beyond.

Lillian Perlmutter’s must-read News-Press investigation of federal immigration arrests in and around Santa Barbara County jails presents extensive evidence that Sheriff Bill Brown is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of California’s landmark “sanctuary state” immigration law.

Meticulously constructed, Perlmutter’s piece combined original documentary reporting, a meta-analysis of previous studies of the ICE arrest issue and first-person interviews, demonstrating that Brown in public statements has systematically underplayed the true scope of federal apprehensions of immigrants being released from county jails.

While informing the Board of Supervisors and state government of only those immigrants his department formally “transferred” to ICE, Brown has been substantially less transparent about the far larger number taken into custody in the lobbies or parking lots of the jails, some with at least the implicit knowledge of the SBSD.

Perlmutter reports:

The California Values Act, a state law often known as SB 54, was intended to prevent migrants from fearing police. It prohibits local law enforcement from transferring anyone into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents unless the person has already been convicted of a felony or certain serious misdemeanors.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office says that in 2025, it transferred 12 people to ICE under the tenets of SB 54. The Sheriff’s Office says a qualifying inmate is notified about the transfer, and when the time comes, is taken to a secure set of doors known as a “sally port,” where an ICE vehicle is waiting.

But dozens more people have been arrested in the lobbies and parking lots of county jails in the past year, including many for whom ICE records do not disclose any conviction, much less a conviction that meets the SB 54 threshold, a Santa Barbara News-Press investigation has found.

While the official number of transfers for the year was 12, federal data suggests in 2025, ICE arrested more than eight times that number at Santa Barbara County jails. (emph. ours).

It’s striking that Brown, normally accessible to local reporters, did not respond to multiple interview requests, according to the News-Press. While it might be assumed that the sheriff himself would like to present his perspective in such a high-profile, comprehensive and long-in-the-works report, he instead dispatched a subordinate to answer questions, but only by email.

As a media matter, Perlmutter’s investigation is significant, not only in advancing local understanding of perhaps the most urgent issue facing Santa Barbara, but also in providing a proof-of-concept case study of the kind of in-depth, enterprise journalism the publishers of the new News-Press promised when the media outlet re-launched.

40 years of Indy independent journalism. Don’t miss the just-opened Faulkner Gallery exhibit, “Covering 40 Years,” which displays 150 covers of the Santa Barbara Independent, drawn from some 2,000 editions of the paper published since its founding.

The exhibit represents a time capsule of the culture, sociology, economics, politics, arts, history and entertainment scene of Santa Barbara over the past four decades. Along the way, it also shows how some local stories become news that stays news: witness a section of a half-dozen or so hung covers that limn community clashes with the oil industry, circling round, from polluted waters, to short-lived triumph of the environmental movement, and back to the recent resurgence of offshore drilling and transportation in SB county.

Newsmakers had little trouble selecting our personal most memorable front page: For their April 26, 2007 edition, Editor in Chief Marianne Partridge and Executive Editor Nick Welsh scrapped their planned cover on deadline, substituting “Have You No Shame, Mrs. McCaw?” a high-impact front that heralded a package of news and commentary on late-breaking developments in the ongoing meltdown of the old News-Press.

The dearly-departed morning paper a few days before had directed a vicious and malicious smear at me, their former editor. The Indy’s response shone a bright light on the falsity of that slander and, in the process, illuminated and shifted the community’s understanding of the critical issues of journalistic ethics and practice underpinning the roiling local newspaper dispute.

Alas, no one knew it at the time, but the then-novel spectacle of a billionaire owner betraying the public trust by using a news organization to benefit their personal interests while punishing their enemies would become all too familiar in the two decades that followed.

We read this stuff so you don’t have to. SB Current, the right-wing fever swamp site heavily populated by MAGA fanboys, xenophobes and Christian nationalists, is typically a toxic stew of predictable Trump propaganda, Crusades-level religious fanaticism and delusional rants attacking the substantial majority of rational Santa Barbara citizens who oppose the cruelty and corruption of the mob boss president.

Occasionally, however, they do get something right.

Last week, the Current published “When Leadership Forgets Who It Serves,” the headline on a thoughtful op-ed by former City Council member Alejandra Gutierrez.

In her 2024 bid for re-election, Gutierrez lost a nail-biter election to left-wing tenant activist Wendy Santamaria, a high-stakes contest that resulted in the balance of power flipping on council on several key issues, most notably rent control.

In her piece, Alejandra recounted how she was dumped by the local Democratic Party - which backed her 2019 election as she ousted Dem-enemy incumbent Jason Dominguez - because of her “independence” on that and other issues during her first-year term:

For years, Democrats have held the majority in this county. With that majority comes responsibility. Yet many of the same issues regularly highlighted today—housing, cost of living, and public safety—are challenges that have existed for years. Voters deserve to ask: if these solutions are so urgent now, why weren’t they addressed when there was already the power to act?

Content aside, the most noteworthy aspect of the piece is that, following the Current’s publication of it on the morning of March 28, both Noozhawk, that afternoon, and the Independent, two days later, followed the pro-Trump outlet’s lead and reprinted the Gutierrez piece.

Back in the day, before the last Ice Age, it was a point of pride among editorial page editors to require exclusive rights to opinion pieces they published from outside writers; in Santa Barbara that guideline is observed mainly in the breach, but it was still surprising to find two well-established publications following the editorial judgment of a soporific start-up permeated with right-wing agitprop.

In this case, SB Current got the scoop.

Montage: Nameplates of (L-R) Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara News-Press, SB Current; Photo: the author and Independent columnist Starshine Roshell stand before the famed “Have You No Shame” cover at the opening of the “Covering 40 Years” exhibit at the Faulkner Gallery (Nick Welsh photo).