Pontiac — Oakland County, a Republican stronghold for decades, is now being roiled by political infighting among Democrats, especially on immigration, as progressive activists pack county Board of Commissioners’ meetings and seek to recall the board’s Democratic chair.
Since February, a group called ICE Out of Oakland County has been filling board meetings in Pontiac, making their presence known with boos and heckles. At a recent meeting, many audience members held up signs that read “Recall Woodward,” referring to Commissioner Dave Woodward, a Royal Oak Democrat and the longtime board chair. One commenter even hurled an expletive at Woodward and then gave him the middle finger.
The Democratic dissidents said they want to hold Woodward and the 12-7 Democratic majority board accountable.
“They’re going to say all of these beautiful things (about supporting immigrants), and words are just words,” said Alexis Chromy, 27, who got involved with ICE Out of Oakland County after fighting for her friend’s sister to get out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention at the end of 2025.
“Actions are what speak louder,” said Chromy, a queer Latina woman who sports tattoos, glasses and a buzz cut and lives in Pontiac.
But most Democratic commissioners, including Woodward, have argued that they have taken steps to oppose the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants on county property and through county-supported systems, among other issues. And that they have followed the advice of their legal counsel to avoid costly litigation with the Trump administration.
“We have accomplished 90% of the things that they’re advocating for, and we have issued a report that has been made part of the public record as a result of that,” Woodward said.
ICE Out of Oakland County is led and organized by Mike Flores, a health care worker who lives in Troy. Although he initially got involved in county politics during COVID-19, Flores said “every day is activism” for him as a gay man.
Since the demands were put forward at the beginning of the year, ICE Out of Oakland County has gained followers from across the county.
ICE Out of Oakland County reflects just how much Oakland County politics have changed since longtime County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, a stalwart Republican, died in 2019. Even though every countywide office, except for the sheriff, is now held by a Democrat, some activists such as Chromy contended Oakland’s government isn’t doing enough on issues such as immigration.
Woodward, who is now appealing petition language that was recently approved for Flores’ other group, I Am Oakland County, to recall him, said he understands that people are afraid, given the climate of the country. Still, he argued that some criticisms against him are just distractions, and he’ll continue to focus on “the things voters expect me to do.”
“And that is lowering costs and raising wages for working families, protecting the most vulnerable among us and making sure our communities are healthy and safe,” Woodward said.
Flores acknowledged that Woodward, a commissioner since 2004, has worked hard to flip the county from Republican to Democrat, which he appreciates. But he said flipping the county blue isn’t enough — he wants his demands met and public meetings to be run differently.
“What you’re seeing from the community is saying, ‘Hey, thank you for this great work, but we expect a lot more from our Democrat-led commission,'” Flores said.
ICE Out makes demands, saying board’s actions don’t go far enough
ICE Out’s list of demands includes setting aside $100,000 to address food insecurity for people who are avoiding ICE, dedicating $50,000 for legal aid for ICE-impacted people and adding two community members to the commission’s Community Safety and Civil Rights ad hoc committee.
The group is also demanding a codified 287(g) agreement ban for the sheriff’s office, meaning the county won’t sign a pact with the federal government that allows deputies to question people about their immigration status or execute administrative warrants on suspected illegal immigrants in jail. The Taylor Police and Jackson County Sheriff’s departments have signed such agreements.
ICE Out wants the county to prohibit all ICE arrests on its property without judicial warrants and a written ban of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from the previously county-run Courts and Law Enforcement Management Information System, or CLEMIS.
So far, the county has formally condemned ICE’s aggressive tactics and prevented ICE from entering non-public county property like offices without a judicial warrant. The commissioners also have endorsed three state Senate bills that prohibit ICE enforcement at sensitive areas such as schools, churches and hospitals; keep government agencies from giving up personal information to ICE without a court warrant; and prohibit police in the state from wearing masks.
Woodward added that ICE won’t get added back to CLEMIS after the county terminated its contract March 31 and said the sheriff’s office will never have a 287(g) agreement. He said the county has more generally set aside money to address food insecurity in the county.
Flores disagreed, saying a 287(g) ban needs to be written into county law for the demand to be fully met. Banning ICE from private county property also doesn’t go far enough, he said. Flores pointed to Washtenaw County, which has been sued by the Department of Justice for banning ICE from all county property without a judicial warrant, as an example of what he wants to see.
“What we’re asking our commissioners is to be brave and to say, ‘Hey, these are the things that are important to our community, and if you threaten and if you sue us, we’re going to see you in court,'” Flores said.
Commissioner Gwen Markham, a Novi Democrat, said the commissioners were advised by county attorneys not to extend their ICE ban as far as Washtenaw County’s.
“There are folks from the crowd who will say, ‘Well, yeah, but you’re getting sued for the right reasons,’” Markham said. “Our job on the commission is to protect residents and protect the financial position of the county. So setting ourselves up to intentionally be sued by the federal government is not acting in a fiduciary way. I’m chair of the finance committee. I can’t just do that.”
ICE Out’s demands have gained support from one commissioner, Charlie Cavell, a Ferndale Democrat who refuses to caucus with his own party. Cavell and Commissioner Kristen Nelson, a Waterford Township Democrat, regularly engage in shouting matches with Woodward during full board meetings, often leading to boos and jeers from the crowd.
Cavell has introduced resolutions for all but one of the ICE Out demands.
“To me, … pretty much every decision for the past year and a half has been anathema to the values of what I think Democrats stand for,” Cavell said.
Woodward countered that the Democratic majority under his leadership has lowered medical and student loan debt for county residents, built affordable housing and diverted people struggling with drug addiction from jail into treatment.
Meeting maneuvers prompted recall effort
The Oakland County Board of Commissioners has been controlled by Democrats since 2018 following more than half a century of Republican control. The county is also managed by Executive Dave Coulter, a Ferndale Democrat and former county commissioner who was appointed in 2019 after Patterson died and has since been elected twice.
As the county’s southern portion has evolved, so have its voting patterns, said Dave Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University, referring to the progressive and liberal tilt of those communities compared with the conservatism in the northern part of the county.
“You see the southern tier of the county become much more racially and ethnically diverse, which leads to changes in voting patterns. You see someone like Brooks Patterson leave the scene, and it creates, to some extent, a vacuum to where people like Dave Coulter and Dave Woodward fill that,” he said.
But Dulio still described Oakland as a “middle-of-the-road county that’s voting for Democrats at the moment.” The politics of most commission Democrats contrasts with a wave of activism at the state’s Democratic Party endorsement convention in April, where attendees loudly rallied for Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate and booed primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens of Birmingham. They also chose Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit to be their attorney general nominee over Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald.
The move to recall Woodward stems from how he handled a vote involving drones for the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office and a decision to move the public comment period to the end of an April meeting.
In a 13-4 vote on April 8, the commissioners approved a free nine-month drone as first responder pilot program through popular technology company Flock. The program enables seven drones for emergency response and continues the sheriff’s drone program, which existed for four years prior to the vote, Woodward said.
But the public comment period on the drone contract was moved from the start of the meeting, as is typically done, to the end of the meeting upon a motion by Commissioner Angela Powell, D-Pontiac.
The next day, Flores and Galbraith organized the group I Am Oakland County in an effort to recall Woodward. The recall petition language focused on Woodward’s vote on the drone program.
Flores and Galbraith held two informational sessions at Flores’ house the following week about the recall process, drawing more than 20 people into Flores’ living room. Cavell was one of them.
To open the meetings, Flores played a video of Woodward overriding Cavell’s request for a roll call vote on moving public comment to the end of the meeting.
“People were angry. They were upset. They were confused,” Flores said. “Do you feel the same way after seeing this video?”
Woodward has called the recall effort “nonsense.”
Mark Brewer, Woodward’s attorney, has said Woodward “is the reason that Oakland County has the Democratic leadership that it has today.”
“He’s worked harder the last 20 years to make it that way, and opponents like the people we saw today are going to do anything they can to try and stop him,” Brewer said after the recall language was approved.
‘People feel the world’s on fire, because the world’s on fire’
Three days after the petition language was approved, the effort to recall Woodward took center stage at a board meeting.
On April 29, Waterford Township resident Taya Lyons made a TikTok telling people to show up at the meeting with pieces of paper that read “Recall” and to flash them at the commissioners during her public comment. She said this was to communicate to the commissioners that audience members would seek to recall all of them — not just Woodward — if they don’t revoke the drone program.
But the signs came out much earlier than Lyons’ public comment. Audience members held them up after Flores loudly claimed Woodward ignored him on the public comment sheet. The audience flashed their signs several more times that evening, cheered after virtually every public comment and booed Woodward when he took a recess.
Woodward has pointed out that Lyons, who has more than 211,300 followers on TikTok, has supported political violence on her platform. In an April 2 video, Lyons expressed support for Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024.
In an emailed response, Lyons told The Detroit News that Woodward “prefers to personally attack and villainize anyone willing to organize to recall him, rather than actually address the issues that led to recall efforts in the first place.” Lyons also said the recall signs sent a message the “we the people” hold the power to fire the commissioners.
Asked about Lyons’ support for Mangione, Flores said I Am Oakland County does not support political violence but can’t control what she says on the internet.
On the tenor of recent county meetings, Woodward said Donald Trump’s presidency has set the tone for the entire country, including Oakland County.
“People feel the world’s on fire, because the world’s on fire,” Woodward said in an emailed statement, adding that commissioner meetings, school boards and city council meetings are the only places “where they feel they can effectively communicate objection, grievance, the issues of the moment. That’s real, and people are scared, and there’s a lot of reason to be scared.”
GOP leaders says leadership style frustrates activists
But commission minority leader Michael Spisz, a Republican from Oxford, said people are frustrated because of the Democratic body’s leadership style. He said the Democratic leaders try to enact an agenda that “has a bunch of bumps in the road that not everybody can get on board with.” He cited a plan to move hundreds of county jobs to downtown Pontiac as an example.
Spisz also said the general public may not understand the rules of meetings. He pointed to a March 11 Democratic Caucus meeting where ICE Out members attempted a sit-in to prevent a closed session to discuss restrictions on immigration officers with county attorneys ― a move allowed under the Open Meetings Act. They then followed the commissioners up to a board room when they moved the meeting to prevent sheriff’s deputies from having to remove the demonstrators.
“I can understand why they’re disgruntled, because maybe they want to understand it too. But from a legal perspective, we have the ability to have attorney-client privilege just like they do if they were talking to their attorney,” Spisz said.
Markham said she plans to speak with the Democratic caucus about enacting different public comment rules. She gave the example of Novi, where one representative of a group is given five minutes to speak, and a list of people who agree with the group representative is provided.
Some activists don’t know who they can trust in today’s climate, and the board of commissioners “is the closest residents will get to speaking directly to a government body,” said Markham, the Novi Democrat.
Recall effort faces ‘a difficult lift,’ GOP commissioner says
If a judge sides with I Am Oakland County and allows the recall petitions against Woodward to be circulated, the group would have to get the signatures of 25% of the number of district voters in the 2022 gubernatorial election. Since 32,745 votes were counted in that race, the group would need to get at least 8,186 signatures by July 31 — something Spisz said will be “a difficult lift.”
“He’s been on the board for a long time, he’s well-known in his district, he’s won multiple elections. So trying to recall is not always as easy as people believe it can be, and I don’t believe anything will change on the board within that timeframe,” Spisz said.
If they are successful, Flores and Galbraith plan to find a progressive candidate to run against Woodward.
“What I think this effort will do is help convince the other commissioners and Woodward that we want them to do great things, … but we want them to accomplish all these great efforts with a higher level of transparency, with community-centered over corporations, and most importantly, with constituents having a voice at the table,” Flores said.
mbryan@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Oakland County Democratic infighting breaks out over ICE, board chair
Reporting by Max Bryan, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
