Supervisor Chyanne Chen arrived at Immigration Court at 630 Sansome St. early this morning to sit in on court proceedings and tour the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities there.
Chen, who represents San Francisco’s District 11, is the third supervisor since late September to do this, following District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
Unlike her predecessors, Chen is also an immigrant.
It is important that San Francisco continues to be a sanctuary city, Chen said. She called the federal government’s recent directives an “attack on the vitality of the city, the intelligence of the city and of America.”
Chen emphasized that she and her colleagues are committed to finding “meaningful and responsible” ways to further fund immigration services, despite the city’s current budget deficit.
It’s “heartbreaking,” Chen said, to see how immigrants are affected by recent ICE raids and arrests. Those impacted include families from the San Francisco Unified School District; one-third of SFUSD students are children of immigrants, she said.
At the door, security personnel informed Chen that Judge Patrick O’Brien had canceled his 8:30 a.m. docket.
Chen entered the building to tour the ICE facility on the sixth floor, where immigrants are detained after ICE arrests them.
She was accompanied by accompanied by Milli Atkinson, the director of the Bar Association of San Francisco’s immigrant legal defense program; Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, the director of the non-profit CARECEN SF; and staff representing Supervisors Fielder and Myrna Melgar.
Although Mission Local accompanied Fielder and Dorsey on their visits to the sixth floor, this time, security blocked Mission Local from doing so. In fact, security informed the group, Mission Local was blocked from the entire building until court proceedings began.
Later, Chen recounted her experience at the ICE facilities to Mission Local via a written statement.
Chen visited the call rooms. These rooms, split by a glass partition, are designed for attorneys to communicate with their clients through phones hung on the walls (a recent ACLU lawsuit states that these phones often do not work).
Atkinson told Chen that sometimes lawyers are forced to wait hours before being allowed to speak with their clients. In those small rooms, Chen wrote, “It seems impossible for lawyers and clients to have sensitive conversations that maintain client-attorney confidentiality.”
Chen also described going beyond areas that Fielder and Dorsey saw. “People are held in an office space for up to 72 hours without food, water, a bed or any opportunity for rest.” The experience made her deeply emotional, Chen wrote.
Back outside of the Sansome Street immigration courthouse, security finally permitted Mission Local to enter the building and travel to the fourth floor at 10:30 a.m. for Judge Joseph Park’s very short docket of six immigrants.
The eight benches sat virtually empty, a stark difference from last week’s proceedings, where attendees packed into the benches, shoulder-to-shoulder.
Only one of the six appeared for their hearing today: A young Colombian woman seeking asylum.
Immigration attorneys from across the Bay Area have reported that their clients fear attending their hearings after months of arrests by ICE that have flooded the news and social media.
“The ICE raids in the courthouses put people in fear,” Concord immigration attorney Wahida Noorzad told Mission Local. If they fail to appear, they get an “automatic deportation order” and a $5,000 fine, but that’s if ICE can manage to catch up with them.
Faced with these options, some asylum-seekers are taking their chances and choosing to go underground.
In the case of the one asylum-seeker who did show, a Colombian woman, Park rescheduled her hearing for early January to allow her time to find an attorney.
Then Park closed out the five remaining cases, one by one. Immigrants from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Peru will now face deportation. “This is an order of absentia,” the judge said as he closed out each case, to a near-empty courtroom. “There is no appeal of this decision.”
So there is mass popular revulsion in San Francisco to ICE’s crimes, and the best we can get from our elected leadership is to show up to the facility and witness?
In Chicago, amazing videos are online showing communities lightly hazing ICE agents, no assault, just getting in their way, as they try to take someone into custody until they make it so difficult for ICE that their target can escape.
Imagine if elected officials organized scores of people in the Sansome building to lightly haze ICE agents until they lost control of the situation their targets could escape?
I can imagine your scenario, and it will lead to the National Guard being called in to support ICE. Which I would rather not see.
marcos loves telling others to engage in risky direct action, while sitting in his condo armchair safe and sound.
Says the clown that thinks only millionaires should live in SF? Get a job David.
Someone should tell her that Federal buildings are not under her jurisdiction.
You don’t understand law. Pretending doesn’t help.
Can we please at least send home the drug dealers? Can we at least agree on that?
Exactly, except that’s not what the Trump admin is prioritizing.