A few dozen American Canyon residents filled City Hall this week to press U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson on federal immigration enforcement, surveillance cameras and airplane noise, just weeks before he faces a fellow Democrat in a reelection fight reshaped by new district lines. The Thursday night town hall also drew Napa County Supervisor Belia Ramos and American Canyon Mayor Pierre Washington; attendees could submit one question each on topics ranging from Flock camera data sharing to the Napa County Airport flight path that has flooded county offices with noise complaints.
ICE Accountability Takes Center Stage
Thompson told the crowd he would push for ICE reforms if reelected, including body cameras, tougher hiring and training standards, and a requirement for judicial warrants before agents enter homes, according to The Napa Valley Register. He said he had long worried about the agency's lack of accountability and guardrails, and told attendees he was right to be concerned because, in his words, ICE had gone off the rails. Thompson acknowledged that residents remain scared despite strong local and state immigrant protection laws, and he called every question raised that night valid and the concerns behind them legitimate.
Ramos told the crowd that the Trump administration's immigration policies have caused fear and disruption in the community, per the same Register account. She pointed to Napa Valley Together, a coalition of organizations serving immigrant communities, as a network the community has come to rely on; the group trains legal observers and trusted messengers who share information vetted by its member organizations. In August, Supervisor Joelle Gallagher referred to county staff the matter of drafting an ordinance concerning new or expanded immigration detention or correctional facilities in the unincorporated county. She made the referral on behalf of the ad hoc inclusion committee, which consisted of Gallagher and Ramos, following a regional push led by Rep. Sam Liccardo.
Flock Cameras Spark Surveillance Worries
Residents also grilled officials on Flock automated license plate readers, which photograph passing vehicles and upload the images to a database. American Canyon contracts with the Napa County Sheriff's Office to manage the city's cameras, and the technology has faced backlash nationally over potential police misuse and unauthorized data sharing with federal and out-of-state agencies, the Register reported. Washington defended the cameras as valuable tools against illegal driving and petty theft, while Ramos said county restrictions on data sharing help address privacy concerns.
Those assurances sit alongside a messier statewide record. California's SB 34 bars local law enforcement from sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state entities or federal agencies, while SB 54, known as the California Values Act, bars sharing that data for immigration enforcement. Attorney General Rob Bonta issued formal guidance in 2023 reminding agencies that such transfers violate state privacy law, according to CalMatters. Yet a June 2025 investigative report found California police agencies ran more than 100 license plate queries on behalf of ICE and Customs and Border Protection in a single month, records obtained by the anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy showed. Just weeks ago, civil liberties organizations sent a formal demand letter to the Marin County Sheriff's Office after audit logs revealed its Flock cameras shared data with out-of-state agencies 254,131 times in a single month in 2024, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, despite a 2022 settlement explicitly restricting such transfers.
Runway 19R Noise Complaints Keep Climbing
Airplane noise rounded out the evening's grievances. Ramos described the existing instrument approach added to Napa County Airport's Runway 19R in 2024 as the safest option when visibility is poor, but said the resulting noise over neighborhoods was unexpected, the Register reported. Because the FAA controls the airspace, the county cannot simply dictate where planes fly; instead, Napa County hired a consulting firm to develop three alternative approach paths and formed a task force of airport commissioners, experienced pilots and affected community members to recommend an option to the Board of Supervisors.
The scale of the complaints helps explain the urgency. Annual aircraft noise complaints jumped from 36 in 2024 to roughly 2,500 in just the first six months of 2026 after the FAA's GPS-based instrument approach concentrated arriving flights into a single low corridor over residential areas regardless of weather, according to Fly Safe Napa Valley. Napa County has held a virtual town hall and scheduled an in-person workshop for Oct. 7 to evaluate three fair-weather flight path concepts developed by Flight Tech Engineering. The existing instrument approach will remain in place for poor-visibility days, and the county plans to present its community feedback and engineering work to the FAA while asking for a lower-impact option when conditions allow. The FAA controls the airspace, so flight paths ultimately fall under federal airspace rules.
Funding Wins and a Tight Reelection Race
Thompson used part of the evening to tout funding he has steered toward the county, including $2.8 million in state funding from the California State Coastal Conservancy for the Napa River Ecology Center and nearly $1.4 million for wildfire protection projects. He identified wildfire-related power shutoffs, weather service funding, water availability and sea level rise as countywide concerns he continues to track. The ecology center funding is meant to support climate-change response work including wetlands restoration, flood protection and regional shoreline planning.
The 14-term incumbent is seeking reelection against Eric Jones, a fellow Democrat and former venture capitalist who has self-funded more than $5.1 million into his campaign after Proposition 50 redrew District 4 to include new conservative-leaning parts of Colusa, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter and Yuba counties, according to CalMatters. Napa resident Gopal Shanker, who attended the town hall, said the format let him hear directly from elected officials without filters from news coverage or social media, adding that such events inform the public and connect it with legislation. Thompson, for his part, praised the gathering as a sincere opportunity to engage with constituents.
