At about 7:50 a.m. Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested a 41-year-old Salvadoran father in the parking lot of his Napa apartment building.
That morning, the man left home with a cup of coffee to drink while driving to work. His wife learned of his arrest when two ICE agents, with their faces covered and law enforcement vests on, knocked on her door to return the cup.
The man is one of at least 50 immigrants who Mission Local has confirmed being arrested in San Francisco over the past couple months. Data shows that number to be much higher.
Later, the woman’s husband called her from the ICE San Francisco field office at 630 Sansome St. Quickly, she gathered her daughter and since she doesn’t own a car, she took a cab from Napa to see him there. The couple spoke on the detention center’s wall-mounted phones, across a plastic divider.
The woman left the building in tears.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again,” she said in Spanish.
She worried that her husband would be taken far away. Many of the immigrants who have been detained are quickly transferred out of the Bay Area, or even out of state, including two who Mission Local reported were sent to Hawaii.
Once detainees are moved from the ICE detention center in San Francisco to other locations, it becomes much more difficult to use legal efforts like habeas corpus to help them return. In some out-of-state detention facilities, judges are also less likely to push back against ICE’s attempts to cancel ongoing asylum cases.
Her husband left El Salvador 11 years ago, the woman said, fleeing gang violence. He worked two jobs in Sonoma to support her and her daughter.
Outside 630 Sansome St., volunteers with the Interfaith Council for Humanity gave her advice and cash to help pay for a Lyft back to Napa. She had to go to her husband’s employers, she said, to alert them that he wouldn’t be coming in for work.
Nikolas De Bremaeker, a lawyer at Centro Legal de la Raza and the Alameda County Rapid Response Network, spoke with the woman’s husband and three other immigrants detained at Sansome that morning, he said.
Among them was a Mexican man who had lived in the United States for 28 years, who was detained Thursday morning at a routine ICE check.
De Bremaeker hasn’t been able to get information as to how many more people are being held there, he added. But one of the detainees that he spoke to described being held in a cell with four other men.
The five men all shared the same open-air toilet in their enclosed space, the detainee told De Bremaeker, and slept on the floor without blankets when night came. They were, the man told him, being treated “‘like animals.’”
De Bremaeker knows of at least two other women held in another cell.
Another person detained at 630 Sansome St. was a 25-year-old Colombian woman, who ICE arrested as she left immigration court around 9:30 am on Thursday morning.
As she left the courtroom with a friend, she was surprised to see three uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers standing by the elevator.
The officers called out her name, according to the friend, then pulled the Colombian woman aside and showed her a picture of herself. Two agents quickly handcuffed her, then placed her in the elevator, to be taken to detention on the 6th floor.
The Colombian woman was one of a dozen immigrants Mission Local saw appear Thursday morning in the courtroom of Judge Patrick O’Brien.
The lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security remained silent as the first four immigration cases, all either married couples or families with children, appeared before the court. O’Brien scheduled their return hearings and recommended they look for lawyers.
But in the case of the Colombian woman, O’Brien’s last case of the morning and the only person that morning who had appeared without a spouse or a child, the attorney representing DHS promptly moved to dismiss her asylum case.
Judge O’Brien thanked the DHS lawyer for the warning. In the past, he has made a point of asking attorneys in his immigration courtroom whether they plan to dismiss any case.
Before continuing, O’Brien turned to the woman and addressed her through a Spanish-language interpreter.
“This is kind of a new thing that the Department of Homeland Security is doing,” he explained to her. The DHS, he said, was moving her from immigration court to expedited removal, a novel legal strategy that Mission Local has observed being used to rapidly detain and deport people since late May.
The woman quickly spun around to face her friend, who was sitting in the back of the courtroom, looking shocked.
In earlier instances that Mission Local has observed, court observers — volunteers who offer legal advice — will pull people aside at this point to explain to them that they will be detained by ICE agents when leaving court. They are also warned not to sign any papers. But there were no court observers present Thursday morning.
“I know this is complicated and probably a little confusing,” said Judge O’Brien.
O’Brien re-scheduled the woman’s next hearing in four weeks, giving her time to respond to the motion. Under normal circumstances, this would allow the woman time to get an attorney. But, O’Brien said, “there’s a good possibility that that hearing is not going to happen.”
“I’m not sure whether I’ll see you again,” he told the woman. “But I hope I do.”
After the woman was arrested, the friend who accompanied her to court called the Santa Clara Rapid Response Network. But because of the high demand for legal support, the network told him that no lawyers could be dispatched to help the woman Thursday.
Nikolas De Bremaeker spoke briefly with the woman while she was detained, and offered advice. The woman told him that DHS agents had given her a document, told her to sign it, and she complied.
She didn’t know what kind of document it was, she told De Bremaeker. He’s not sure, either. De Bremaeker wrote later that the woman had “severe medical issues, which, if not attended to, as happens frequently in ICE custody, will likely result in infections and infertility.”
When Judge Patrick O’Brien resumed his master calendar hearings at 10:30 a.m., none of the four remaining immigrants who had been called to court showed up. Absent from court, they were all ordered deported.
what a great service you are performing, As a former Republican office holder I am embarrassed by how Steve Miller is running this outrageous program. Miller is evil and will bring Trump down .
Good. Glad to see ICE is doing its job, rounding up these illegal immigrants who came here to take our jobs and housing.
Frankie, it might be helpful if you could tell us the average number of daily ICE detentions in SF going back in time. Because two per day may well be the average going back years. It might even be higher. It is their job after all.
Also one of your examples is in Napa – a long way from SF!
In another article linked from this one you can see that arrests in the SF area have roughly doubled since last year. Also, the man was in fact detained in SF – his home is in Napa.
It’s time to start reporting on the conditions that detained people are being held in.
Trump round one was penning young kids up. Are we at least providing proper living conditions for the people caught up in the system?