Youngblood’s defiant views have made him a rare voice of dissent in what has become the nation’s most welcoming state for people in the country illegally.
Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood was hiking along the bluffs overlooking Bakersfield last year when he got a call from Gov. Jerry Brown.
“What are you trying to do to me?” the sheriff said Brown asked him.
“What are you trying to do to me?” Youngblood shot back.
A Republican in one of the reddest counties in the state, Youngblood had riled the Democratic governor when he announced that his department would defy the Trust Act, a law signed by Brown that restricts cooperation between local law enforcement officials and federal immigration agents.
The sheriff said the law put him in an impossible position, stuck between a federal program that relies on local jails to hold inmates who might be deportable and a state law that says inmates in jail for low-level crimes can’t be detained past their release dates.
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