How can California stop ICE overreach? The answer might lie in a 1972 case from Humboldt County

San Francisco Chronicle​

2 days ago

Might the answer to Los Angeles' present emergency — how to stop masked federal agents from seizing its people — lie in a half-century-old story from Humboldt County?
On April 4, 1972, a young hippie couple — Dirk Dickenson and Judy Arnold — were in their remote cabin near unincorporated Garberville when federal drug agents and county sheriff's personnel, assisted by a U.S. Army helicopter, launched a raid. The sheriff promised reporters, who came along, that this would be the 'biggest bust' in California history.
'Looks like an assault on an enemy prison camp in Vietnam,' one reporter wrote in his notebook.
Lloyd Clifton, an agent with the new federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now the Drug Enforcement Agency), broke down the cabin door without knocking or announcing himself as law enforcement. He and other agents wore jeans and tie-dyed shirts instead of uniforms and kept their hair long. Dickenson and Arnold thought they were being robbed.
Dickenson, unarmed, ran out the back door. Clifton gave chase and shot him in the back. Dickenson died on the way to a Eureka hospital.
What happened next caused a scandal.
The agents couldn't find the sought-after PCP lab or any evidence of a drug enterprise on the property or inside a cabin without electricity or running water.
The U.S. Department of Justice defended the federal agent, quickly declaring Dickenson's execution a 'justifiable homicide.' But Humboldt County District Attorney William Ferroggiaro, noting that federal agents must obey state and local laws, investigated and took his case to a grand jury, which charged Clifton with second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter.
Clifton's indictment spared a court fight, which ended up establishing a legal path for holding federal agents accountable for abuses.
The existence of such a path may surprise today's Californians. That's because our police insist that they are powerless to challenge unlawful actions or abuses by federal agents. Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell advised officers that, when called to a scene where citizens allege federal abuses, all they can do is verify the identities of federal agents.
In this position, McDonnell and police are not just wrong — they are violating their oaths to enforce state and local laws. The Clifton case makes this plain.
In 1973, Clifton first asked state courts to drop the prosecution, but multiple judges refused. With the trial about to start, Clifton appealed to U.S. District Courts, arguing that as a federal agent, he was beyond the reach of state law.
The federal courts did not accept Clifton's argument. But in 1977, Clifton succeeded in convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco to free him, on the theory that he 'reasonably and honestly' believed Dickenson was a dangerous drug dealer (even though Dickenson wasn't). In his Clifton v. Cox ruling, U.S. Judge Stanley Conti wrote that federal law enforcement officials could be prosecuted for state and local crimes when 'the official employs means which he cannot honestly consider reasonable in discharging his duties or otherwise acts out of malice or with some criminal intent.'
Establishing malice and criminal intent is a high bar, but Californians eager to pursue Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel are revisiting the Clifton standard. In a June YouGov poll, commissioned by the Independent California Institute, 72% of respondents said police should arrest federal immigration officials who 'act maliciously or knowingly exceed their authority under federal law.'
Recent federal abuses, captured on video, would seem to meet the Clifton test for prosecution. A federal agent's repeated punching of a Santa Ana landscaper. A retaliatory attack by federal agents, using explosives, on the Huntington Park home of U.S. citizens.
The Clifton case, by making clear that federal agents are not above California laws, should open the door for local police to investigate every one of these lawless ICE raids. Given the scale of the federal assault, I'd suggest that police departments create a joint task force, perhaps in collaboration with a new state authority.
Some may object that 2025 Los Angeles and 1970s Humboldt are too different. But I was struck, while rereading Clifton case records and a 1973 Rolling Stone story by Joe Estzerhas, by the parallels of the two eras.
In the 1970s drug raids, as with today's immigration raids, federal agents seized people based on little evidence, failed to identify themselves, received military assistance (that helicopter) and dressed like criminals rather than law enforcement. The Nixon administration, like the Trump administration, justified its lawlessness by claiming that federal agents were chasing 'radicals.'
After the U.S. Court of Appeals canceled his indictment, Clifton continued his federal career. He died in 2013.
Dickenson was buried in Lincoln, a Sacramento suburb in Placer County, near where he grew up. But his precedent-setting case remains very much alive.