Santa Clara/California v. ICE (Gilroy): Docket Shows Full NEPA/ICA/Zoning Complaint, Federal Opposition Claiming '10 Detainees,' and an Unresolved Hearing-Date Discrepancy Between Press (Sept. 8) and the Court's Own Docket Text (Oct. 7)

Case identified: County of Santa Clara v. United States Immigration & Customs Enforcement, N.D. Cal. 5:26-cv-05604, filed June 10, 2026. Named defendants: ECG 6 LLC, Edward Forst, Markwayne Mullin, DHS, GSA, ICE, and David Venturella. Assigned to Judge Eumi K. Lee (reassigned from Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen on June 18, 2026).

The complaint’s specific claims (not paraphrase — pulled from docket entry text and declaration captions)

Filed June 10, 2026 as an APA action (Cause: 05:702 Administrative Procedure Act) seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. The complaint and the June 24 preliminary-injunction motion package (24 separate declarations plus a request for judicial notice) allege:

• NEPA: federal defendants proceeded with construction/demolition at 7240 Holsclaw Road without the environmental review NEPA requires — supporting exhibits include a “CATEX NEPA MEMO,” a “Floodplain Memo FOIA,” DHS NEPA Directive 023-01, DHS NEPA Instruction Manual 023-01, and ICE Directive 11087.2, all entered via the June 30 Declaration of Leily Arzy in support of the Request for Judicial Notice.
• Zoning/land-use: the 25-acre Holsclaw parcel has been “zoned exclusively for agricultural use since 1967” (per Bakersfield.com’s July 22 report on the same suit) — this is the county-zoning-bypass claim, not a NEPA claim.
• Contamination/hazard history: declarations from county Environmental Health, Hazardous Materials, and Compliance staff document “three decades of documented leaks and spills on the Holsclaw Property from hazardous materials, including thiram, a toxic fungicide,” plus septic-system releases of DNA-extraction waste, ethidium bromide, calcium hypochlorite, and acid-based wash water (per the complaint text quoted directly by San José Spotlight).
• The ICA framing that the source lead named does not appear as a distinct statutory count on the docket — the operating theory as filed is NEPA + APA + zoning, not a standalone Intergovernmental Cooperation Act claim. This may be a mischaracterization carried from the original July 13 canon entry rather than the actual pleaded counts; the complaint PDF itself is not freely available (PACER-gated on RECAP, no bought copy indexed as of this research), so the precise count list could not be verified against the primary document text. Flag as unresolved — see gaps below.

Litigation posture as of August 26, 2026

• June 24, 2026 — plaintiffs (Santa Clara County + California) filed a fully-briefed Motion for Preliminary Injunction with 12 supporting declarations (county planning, environmental health, hazmat, GIS, and outside experts) plus a Request for Judicial Notice.
• July 13, 2026 — parties stipulated to a briefing schedule (opposition due 8/12, reply due 8/26); Judge Lee granted the stipulation as modified. This is the filing canon previously characterized as “the consent agreement” pausing construction through September 9 — it is more precisely a stipulated briefing-schedule order, not a separate freestanding consent decree with its own violation counts.
• July 27, 2026 — Monterey County and a coalition of other Bay Area/Central Coast jurisdictions filed a motion for leave to file an amicus curiae brief supporting the injunction — consistent with the coalition-building pattern canon already tracks (2026-05-19–monterey-county-resolution-opposing-gilroy-ice-detention-facility, 2026-06-23–marin-county-joins-ca-ag-gilroy-ice-facility-amicus-coalition).
• August 12, 2026 — federal defendants filed their opposition (2 opposition documents + 2 supporting declarations). Per Mountain View Voice’s Aug. 20 report, the filing calls the plaintiffs’ case “an 800-page stack of questionable assumptions,” disputes the 150-detainee capacity figure plaintiffs cite, and states the facility will “typically house about 10 detainees” — with the caveat that “[m]aximum occupancy of the facility will be determined once remodeling is complete.” The opposition also argues the project should be exempt from federal environmental review (categorical exclusion), and warns that delay threatens continuity of local ICE operations because the Morgan Hill field office lease was set to expire “later this month” (i.e., late August 2026).
• August 26, 2026 — plaintiffs filed their reply brief (docket entry 60), the final scheduled briefing event before the hearing.

The hearing-date discrepancy — genuinely unresolved, flagged rather than asserted

Multiple, independent, recent press sources (San José Spotlight, Aug. 2 and Aug. 20 pieces, syndicated to Mountain View Voice and SFGate; Politico via Rep. Liccardo’s office, Aug. 5) consistently report the preliminary-injunction hearing is set for September 8, 2026 at the San Jose federal courthouse.

The CourtListener docket’s own auto-generated hearing-notice text says otherwise. Tracing the docket chronologically:

1. The original June 11 scheduling order set an “Initial Case Management Conference” for 9/8/2026 9:30 AM.
2. On June 18, the case was reassigned to Judge Lee; the reassignment order explicitly states “ALL HEARING DATES PRESENTLY SCHEDULED… ARE VACATED AND SHOULD BE RE-NOTICED.” The Case Management Conference was re-noticed for 10/7/2026 at 1:30 PM.
3. The June 24 Motion for Preliminary Injunction docket entry itself states: “Motion Hearing set for 10/7/2026 10:00 AM in San Jose, Courtroom 7, 4th Floor before Judge Eumi K. Lee” — i.e., the PI hearing was calendared for the same day as the reset case management conference, six days after the reassignment order vacated the September date.

No docket entry after June 24 that was captured in this pass shows the hearing being reset back to September. The July 13 stipulation (entries 40/41) is titled and scoped as a briefing-schedule order; its full text is PACER-gated (no free RECAP copy available) and could not be verified to confirm or rule out a hearing-date change bundled into that order. It is plausible — and would resolve the discrepancy cleanly — that the stipulation also reset the hearing back to align with the September 9 construction-pause deadline, since an October 7 hearing five weeks after that pause expires would leave a gap in the injunction’s coverage. Absent the primary document, this cannot be confirmed either way.

Reporting discipline: because independent, recent (as-of-Aug.-20) tier-2 journalism converging on September 8 is the stronger signal available, and because it directly reflects reporters’ review of “new court documents filed last week” (the Aug. 12 opposition), this entry treats September 8, 2026 as the operative hearing date for practical tracking purposes, while flagging that the free portion of the federal docket text is inconsistent with it. Do not cite this as fully court-confirmed without either (a) the actual PDF of the July 13 stipulated order, or (b) a docket entry after that date explicitly re-setting the hearing.

What the September/October hearing will decide

Both dates put the ruling on the preliminary-injunction motion after the parties’ own construction-pause stipulation (through September 9) — meaning the pause itself may lapse before, at, or shortly after the hearing regardless of which date controls, and its “durability” turns on whether the court converts it to an injunction (or extends it by further stipulation) rather than on the calendar date per se.

Structural note — ag-zoning claim vs. NEPA claim, cross-checked against the WEXMAC-TITUS census

research-warehouse-conversion-injunction-census-and-disposition-trail-2026-08-27 already documents a parallel ag-zoning fact pattern at Tremont/Upper Bern, PA — but that case was resolved through state DEP permitting authority, not a federal NEPA claim; permits were withdrawn July 22, 2026 without ever reaching a NEPA ruling. Gilroy is the only site in this research program combining ag-zoning and a live, briefed federal NEPA/APA claim headed to a ruling. This is not yet evidence of a repeatable “ag-zoned land bypasses NEPA” legal mechanism being deployed nationally — it is one live case and one already-resolved case that used a different lever entirely. A broader multi-site NEPA-bypass claim should not be asserted from this research pass; see gaps below.