Mendocino’s sheriff is treasurer of a private nonprofit that funds the county’s trafficking raids

MENDOCINO CO., 9/8/26 — In May, Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies found a man at an illegal cannabis grow near Navarro who told them he had been forced to live and work there for two years, without pay. Two months later, a July 25 news release announcing three and a half weeks of raids farther north listed the same issues at several of the sites: no identification documents, “little or no meaningful pay,” little or no freedom to leave.

The same release put numbers on the operation: 173,244 plants pulled near Covelo, Laytonville, Potter Valley and Redwood Valley, 26 guns seized, more than 30 sites investigated. Investigators had “contacted victims of suspected forced labor trafficking,” it said. It didn’t say how many, or what became of them.

At the bottom, the release thanked the agencies that helped. One is not a government agency.

The Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities is a private nonprofit, incorporated in 2021. Its board is six elected officials: Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal, president; Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall, treasurer; Trinity County Sheriff Tim Saxon, secretary; Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue; Lake County Sheriff Lucas Bingham; and Humboldt County District Attorney Stacey Eads. It answers to no county board of supervisors and keeps no public minutes.

The coalition’s money comes from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation of Decatur, Ill., the philanthropy of Warren Buffett’s eldest son, a farmer and former sheriff. The foundation spent $486 million in 2024, with human trafficking as one of its three program areas. Under the grant agreement with the Northern California coalition, the foundation can stop the money at any time, and the coalition may not discuss the foundation’s role without its written permission.

Buffett was sworn in as sheriff of Macon County, Ill., on Sept. 15, 2017, and served about 14 months. Announcing a state police trafficking unit in Decatur on Aug. 13, 2025, he told a news conference there were investigations during his time as sheriff in which his officers missed the trafficking. “Many communities do not think human trafficking is happening where they live,” he said in a statement that day, “but our work has shown that the more resources are dedicated to this issue, the more the crime is uncovered and disrupted.” Illinois, he said, was the seventh state with a trafficking task force his foundation helps pay for.

What the money pays for

In Mendocino County, that money pays the sheriff’s task force commander. It pays for the hotel room, phone and food a rescued worker gets, through Waymakers, an Orange County victim-services nonprofit that holds coalition funds for that purpose. Elsewhere it buys tools for cracking seized cellphones and paid for a helicopter that flies eradication missions.

The coalition describes its purpose differently depending on who is asking. To the state, in its bylaws, it fights “human trafficking and the environmental impact of cannabis production.” To the IRS, the same, plus the word “illegal.” To the public, on its website, it dismantles transnational criminal organizations.

Kendall calls increasing illicit cultivation a crisis. On Sept. 1, asking supervisors to accept a $4.5 million state grant for cannabis enforcement, he said 75% of the county’s homicides last year and this year were tied to illegal cannabis. “Those homicides occurred in illicit marijuana sites,” he said. “These grow sites are largely controlled by transnational drug trafficking organizations. We know that for a fact.”

Who the coalition answers to

Sociologists have a name for this. In a 2025 paper in the journal Socius, a University of Chicago team led by Robert Vargas defined police finance organizations: private entities that channel money to police without the accountability that binds police departments. The team counted 616 of them, spending $461 million over six years.

The trouble, Vargas said in a Sept. 3 interview, is who the police then answer to. “That money should be coming from taxpayers so that police could be accountable to taxpayers and not to the donors,” he said. “A hundred years ago, half of the Chicago Police Department was on the payroll of Al Capone. And if Al Capone were alive today, he would have created all sorts of police foundations all throughout the country to do his philanthropy.”

A private entity “functioning as what might be called a de facto arm of the government without proper transparency and public accountability” is a concern, said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, which litigates open-government cases. “Same as private prisons or private detention.”

California’s open-meetings law, the Brown Act, reaches private bodies that receive public money. The act doesn’t appear to cover a body “created by a private donor to give money to public agencies as opposed to receiving money from public agencies,” Loy said. “Maybe the Brown Act ought to be amended to cover this kind of situation if it becomes common.”

Jean Bruggeman, co-executive director of Freedom Network USA, a national coalition of anti-trafficking lawyers and service providers, said the coalition’s activities should be subject to public-records law no matter who pays. “It’s still government resources, even if the funding comes from a private source,” she said in a Sept. 3 interview.

Two county supervisors, responding by email Friday to questions about the coalition, called for greater transparency. District 5 Supervisor Ted Williams said private grants “can provide valuable resources, but funding used for county law enforcement should be transparent and subject to appropriate county oversight, regardless of its source. The public should be able to understand who is providing the money, how it is being spent, what conditions are attached and what results are being achieved.” He said he intends to seek additional information. 

District 3 Supervisor John Haschak said he was unaware of the arrangement. “I have not heard about this before,” he wrote. “I look forward to learning about this and believe that transparency is the best policy.”

Neither Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster nor Sheriff Matt Kendall responded to requests for comment about the zero trafficking conviction rate or the practice of using private resources for public law enforcement work.

Where the money goes

The coalition’s proposed budget for the grant year that ended July 31, 2025, released by Mendocino County under the Public Records Act, details more than $2 million in spending.

Two-fifths of the $2 million never reached a member county directly. The coalition paid vendors itself. The largest, the Applied Research Center, got $599,642 for work that, the budget says, turns up “previously unknown links between local criminal actors, out-of-state entities, and transnational criminal organizations.”

Humboldt County, whose sheriff is the coalition’s president, got four times what Mendocino did. Lake County, which joined in January 2025, got nothing.

Mendocino’s $170,631 bought no victim services; the coalition pays for those directly. All but $14,500 covered reimbursement for two half-time county jobs: the task force commander and a sheriff’s technology specialist whose job, in the budget’s words, is “to obtain data from social media, internet, etc. and work with intel analyst.” The county’s request for the year that ended this July grows the commander’s post to three-quarter time, retitled “program manager,” and again budgets nothing for travel, field work or victims.

The seven positions the coalition funds through county payroll cover county jobs, with county titles and county salaries. Among them: Rebecca Buckley-Stein, a Humboldt deputy district attorney assigned in February 2026 to build trafficking cases in all five counties, and Mendocino’s task force commander, identified by the sheriff’s office as Scott Mayberry.

Does it work?

The coalition reports its results to the Buffet foundation twice a year. Its March report covers August 2025 through March 2026. In those eight months, it says, the coalition ran 39 operations, met 35 people it calls potential victims and opened 19 cases. The coalition has not said what it counts as a case. The Voice asked twice in writing for more details but the coalition has not said what happened to the 35 people. It has not won a single trafficking conviction.

A trafficking victim can apply for a T visa to stay in the country legally. Law enforcement can help by certifying that the person was a victim. The Mendocino County sheriff’s office has produced no certifications for 2022 through 2026. It says it keeps no list of the trafficking victims it has referred for help.

Even with a certification, the visa is for all practical purposes out of reach. The federal government has all but stopped issuing T visas, Bruggeman said. “It would take over 10 years at this pace to decide on an application that was submitted today,” she said. A victim who cooperates gets no protection while waiting, and traffickers know it. “When we fail to protect victims, what we’re doing is empowering traffickers,” she said. “And that’s what’s happening right now.”

“We have yet to have a perfect, successful, prosecuted case for trafficking,” Summer Hansen, the coalition’s public information specialist, told the Voice. 

Convictions need cooperating victims, she said, and courts “won’t follow through on a case for trafficking if there are no cooperative victims throughout the entire case.” 

The victims rarely stay. “No matter how much we support these victims, they pretty much always just want to go home,” she said, “and sometimes their home is in other countries or in other states. They’ve already been exploited. And then for us to ask them to stick around to make sure that the perpetrator goes to jail — it’s never the case.”

The workers are afraid to talk, the coalition told the foundation in March. They “may have been warned not to speak to outsiders,” it wrote. “They may fear retaliation.” Fear of immigration enforcement ran deeper than expected; deputies now announce on arrival that they’re not ICE. “I literally cannot enforce immigration law,” Kendall said. “I’m not a federal agent.” He said the same thing, word for word, to the supervisors on Sept. 1 during a discussion of another cannabis enforcement grant, this one from the state.

The first person a worker meets is not a deputy or anyone in a law enforcement uniform, Hansen said; interviewers, victim-witness staff and environmental specialists are civilians. “Like myself — I’m a public information officer. I’m not a cop. I don’t have a gun.” Whether a worker helps build a case is up to the worker, Kendall said. “We are not pressuring them one way or the other.”

Witnesses are hard to keep because there’s nowhere in Mendocino County to put them: no shelter beds, no facility, no shelter contracts, Hansen said. Hence the hotel rooms booked through Waymakers, 600 miles away, are put into service. “When we extract victims and they need somewhere to stay, we give them a hotel. We give them phones. We give them food.” This is all done by a contractor.

Other charges are easier to prove

The cases that stick are the ones that don’t need the victim. When workers won’t stay to testify, investigators charge what they can prove without them: workers’ compensation fraud, environmental crimes and labor violations. This is an approach, the coalition’s third-year report said, that allows “comprehensive cases against these criminal organizations, even in the absence of direct human trafficking charges.”

“The courts will allow us to prosecute for wage theft and some of the other things that come along with the labor exploitation that we find on scene,” Hansen said. “That’s a route that we’re finding more successful.” A felony wage theft case may soon put a defendant in custody, she said, “because that’s possible to do without the victims.”

“We don’t have a really flashy number that makes us look real good about trafficking convictions,” she said.

Asked whether the coalition’s work leads to convictions, Kendall reached for a different measure. “If someone lights a building on fire, the first thing to do is put out that building,” he said. “Whether or not we get a conviction on that case, the fire is still out.”