20 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
What we know so far about how Trump's deportation effort is unfolding in the Bay Area
As of last month, Carolina's quest for asylum from violence in her Indigenous Guatemalan community seemed to be on track. The mother of two, who speaks only her native K'iche' language, had recently completed a check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and was living with her family in Contra Costa County.
Then she received a surprise message on her ICE smartphone app.
'This is your ICE officer,' the June 2 message said, according to Carolina's attorney. 'We want you to come in for an appointment.'
Carolina did as she was told, arriving at 630 Sansome St. in San Francisco the next day. It wasn't until after she was arrested that her attorney — who shared her story with the Chronicle and asked that only her first name be used for her protection — would learn the reason for the appointment: Carolina's asylum case had been set aside without a reason given, and an old removal order reinstated.
Leaving behind her husband and two young children, Carolina was flown to an ICE detention center in Arizona that same day.
Carolina is among dozens of people that local advocates estimate have been arrested in the Bay Area this month in stepped-up operations by federal immigration authorities, as the Trump administration seeks to fulfill a campaign promise by boosting deportation numbers. The effort has been both expansive and disjointed, advocates say, going beyond promises to deport 'the worst of the worst ' while splitting families apart and leaving state officials scrambling for answers.
While federal authorities have long had discretionary power to reject asylum applications and other temporary protections that allow people to remain in the U.S., previous administrations have typically used the tactic on a case-by-case basis, said Carolina's attorney, Hayden Rodarte, who focuses on asylum applications for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
'But this is the first time we're seeing it in this systematic way,' Rodarte said, noting that Carolina has no criminal history and is the main caregiver for her 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. 'This is the new reality now.'
ICE officials have declined to release information about key aspects of recent Bay Area immigration operations, including how many people have been arrested, who they are and why certain people have been targeted for removal.
ICE has posted videos on social media of arrests throughout Los Angeles at workplaces and elsewhere, and photos of those detained with alleged criminal histories, but immigration attorneys said the arrests in the Bay Area target those who are trying to follow the process and show up to court.
'They should be showing up to their court hearing. It's the right thing to do but it's so scary,' said Roujin Mozaffarimehr, a managing partner at ImmiCore Law, a Silicon Valley firm. 'It's just really nerve-racking.'
Inside the information vacuum, local networks of immigration advocates, attorneys and courtroom observers have worked to piece together everything they know about the cases, in hopes of better understanding how ICE operations are unfolding in the Bay Area.
Catherine Seitz, the legal director at the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said people have been arrested when they show up for a meeting with ICE during their removal proceedings, an often lengthy legal process. Those meetings typically happen once a year; ICE checks that the cases are still pending and people typically return home, Seitz said.
In addition, ICE is detaining people, including those seeking asylum, who arrive to immigration courts in San Francisco and Concord for scheduled hearings. In some cases, government attorneys are attempting to remove people who have been here for less than two years by requesting their cases to be dismissed. Immigration officials then detain people and pursue expedited removal proceedings, a measure that is typically used at airports or at the border, Seitz said.
'The confusing part is, under the last administration, (a dismissed case) was a good thing,' Seitz said, adding that people could then move forward with their asylum petitions. Seitz said that by using expedited removals, the government can typically move forward with deporting someone without going before a judge.
This was the case for Carolina, who arrived in the U.S. along with one of her children in January 2024, joining her husband and older child. Carolina, who is from an Indigenous rural area of Guatemala, applied for asylum while citing the violence and persecution from the government there.
'What hurts us most is seeing the children suffer through this,' Carolina's sister said in a statement translated from K'iche' and provided by immigration attorneys. 'Our country has so much violence and we fled to this country with the hopes of finding joy here. But now we're seeing things worsen here with family separations.'
There is no removal order for Carolina's husband and children, and the rest of the family's asylum cases remain pending before immigration court in Concord, Rodarte said.
Because federal agencies have not released information on the arrests, advocates and attorneys have sought to use their networks to keep an unreliable count of the number of people detained. Last weekend, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside of an ICE facility in San Francisco after immigrants said they had received orders to check in with the federal agency — spurring concerns from advocates that officials were planning to detain people with detention circumstances similar to Carolina's. Though a handful of immigrants showed up Saturday and Sunday, the office remained closed and ICE officials did not detain anyone, later saying that the closure was due to protests.
ICE enforcement in the Bay Area has differed from Los Angeles, where the agency has targeted car washes and other workplaces, as well as gathering spots for day laborers such as Home Depot parking lots, to take people into custody — sparking conservative support along with widespread protests and accusations of racial profiling.
Trump has waffled on the tactics, at times saying migrant workers are dangerous and take jobs that could go to Americans, and at other times saying they are ' almost impossible to replace.'
But with the Department of Homeland Security this week reversing instructions for ICE to pause raids on farms, meat packing plants, restaurants and hotels, advocates for immigrants worry that the more aggressive actions ICE has taken in Los Angeles and parts of the Central Valley could happen in the Bay Area.
Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden, said the Trump administration appears intent on reaching arrest quotas of 3,000 people per day. To achieve those goals, ICE has begun targeting immigrants who have been vetted and given a legal status to stay in the country, versus focusing on only those with criminal histories. There aren't enough people with criminal backgrounds to meet the quotas that the White House has set, Houser said.
'When you set quotas at the White House of arrests,' he said, 'ICE is going to take the easiest path to get their hands on people that they can bring into detention.'
Since Trump's second term started, ICE said it has arrested over 236,000 people who were in the country illegally and deported more than 207,000, below the administration's goals but a significant increase from recent years. In his first term, Trump deported 1.5 million people, while Biden had deported 1.1 million people as of February 2024, according to Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
The detainment of more people poses other challenges for immigration courts. There are currently roughly 700 federal immigration judges — a decrease after Trump fired judges in California, Louisiana and other states — and a backlog of nearly 3 million pending cases due in part to a spike in people seeking asylum since 2022, according to government data.
In many cases, it can take someone going through a removal proceeding nearly 10 years to get ahead of a judge, said Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration attorney.
'If he's just going to put another million people a year in immigration court,' Shusterman said, 'it'll take 15 to 20 years to get a hearing.'
