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Tag Archives: California
SFGATE: Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid
Glass House Brands released its first public comment Monday since the California company faced a violent raid from federal authorities last month that left one man dead and hundreds arrested.
On July 10, federal agents searched two of the company’s Southern California cultivation facilities — one in Ventura County and one in Santa Barbara County — in an operation that quickly descended into chaos. Officers fired tear gas inside the facilities and searched for immigrants as hundreds of protesters gathered outside to protest the Donald Trump administration’s action. One worker fell from a green house and later died, marking the first known death in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Following the raid, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had arrested at least 361 people suspected of being in the country illegally, as well as 14 “migrant children,” although the agency hasn’t shared any court documentation behind those figures.
Glass House, one of California’s largest legal cannabis companies, had not issued any public comment in the weeks following the raid other than a post to X on July 11 confirming it was being raided.
On Monday, the company broke its silence with a news release that outlined details of the operation, including that nine company employees were detained or arrested. The company said any other people arrested would have been employed by farm labor companies that provide employees for the farm, which is a common practice at agricultural facilities.
Glass House said that it has not been able to determine the identities of the alleged minors but said that if minors were at the facility “none of them were Glass House employees.”
There has been widespread fear in the cannabis industry that federal agents could have been conducting a much broader operation investigating the cultivation of marijuana itself, which is still federally illegal and could lead to federal criminal charges against the company and its staff. Video apparently taken during the raid and posted to social media showed a federal agent saying, “This is not an immigration raid.”
Monday’s news release countered that narrative, saying the raid was led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that the search warrant was authorized specifically for “evidence of possible immigration violations.” Glass House said that “very few documents were seized pursuant to the search warrant.”
The company did not say if its farming operations have been delayed or stalled, which could strike an economic blow to the public company during the summer harvest season, but did say it has since improved its labor practices to comply with federal immigration law, increased age controls for anyone entering its farms, and signed a labor peace agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The company had previously been accused of working with a “fake union” that never attempted to unionize or represent any employees at the company.
Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid
The raid marked the first death in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
https://www.sfgate.com/cannabis/article/calif-cannabis-farm-breaks-silence-ice-raid-20800994.php
Kansas City Star: Court Upholds Restraining Order in Blow to ICE
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has criticized President Trump’s aggressive ICE raids, arguing they harm the city’s economy by spreading fear among immigrants. She notes significant business losses in Latino neighborhoods like Boyle Heights. Bass condemned the use of National Guard and Marines to quell protests, calling it excessive.
Earlier this month, a federal court upheld a restraining order against indiscriminate ICE arrests in Southern California. Bass joined a lawsuit to stop the raids, highlighting their impact on families, while adopting a bolder leadership approach amid recovery from January 2025 wildfires and her 2026 reelection campaign.
…
Bass said, “Let me just say that, because we are a city of immigrants, we have entire sectors of our economy that are dependent on immigrant labor. We have to get the fire areas rebuilt. We’re not going to get our city rebuilt without immigrant labor.”
Bass added, “And it’s not just the deportations, it’s the fear that sets in when raids occur, when people are snatched off the street. And I know you are aware that even people who are here legally, even people who are U.S. citizens, have been detained.”
Bass stated that “what I think we need is comprehensive immigration reform. I served in Congress for 12 years.” She stressed the importance of immigrant labor in post-crisis recovery and noted that ICE raid fears impact both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/court-upholds-restraining-order-in-blow-to-ice/ss-AA1Khr9r
San Francisco Chronicle: Trump asks SCOTUS to allow profiling in California ICE raids
Any attorney who files or argues in favor of this appeal should be disbarred!
Any justice who votes in favor of this appeal should impeached and removed!
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow officers to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants in Southern California because of how they look, what language they’re speaking and what kind of work they’re doing, factors that federal judges have found to be baseless and discriminatory.
Last month’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Frimpong, upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California,” D. John Sauer, the Justice Department’s solicitor general, said Thursday in a filing with the Supreme Court. “This Court should end this attempted judicial usurpation of immigration-enforcement functions” and suspend the injunction while the case is argued in the lower courts, Sauer wrote.
The Central District, which includes Los Angeles County and six other counties, has nearly 20 million residents, more than any other federal court district in the nation. It became the focus of legal disputes over immigration enforcement after President Donald Trump took control of the California National Guard in June and sent thousands of its troops to the streets in Los Angeles to defend immigration agents against protesters of workplace raids.
A 9th Circuit panel upheld Trump’s commandeering of the National Guard, rejecting a lawsuit by Gov. Gavin Newsom. But Frimpong, an appointee of President Joe Biden, ruled July 11 that immigration officers were overstepping legal boundaries in making the arrests, and issued a temporary restraining order against their practices.
In a ruling Aug. 1 upholding the judge’s decision, another 9th Circuit panel said federal officers had been seizing people from the streets and workplaces based on four factors: their apparent race or ethnicity, the language they spoke or accent in their voice, their presence in a location such as a car wash or an agricultural site, and the type of work they were doing.
That would justify the arrest of anyone “who appears Hispanic, speaks Spanish or English with an accent, wears work clothes, and stands near a carwash, in front of a Home Depot, or at a bus stop,” the panel’s three judges said. They agreed with Frimpong that officers could not rely on any or all of those factors as the basis for an arrest.
But the Trump administration’s lawyers said those factors were valid reasons for immigration arrests in the Central District.
In April, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston issued a similar order against the Border Patrol, prohibiting immigration arrests in the Eastern District of California unless officers have a reasonable suspicion that a person is breaking the law. The district is based in Sacramento and extends from Fresno to the Oregon border.
“You can’t just walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers,’” Thurston, a Biden appointee, said at a court hearing, CalMatters reported. The Trump administration has appealed her injunction to the 9th Circuit.
The administration’s compliance with the Central District court order was questioned by immigrant advocates on Wednesday after a raid on a Home Depot store near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, in which officers said 16 Latin American workers were detained. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney, Mohammad Tajsar, said the government “seems unwilling to fulfill the aims of its racist mass deportation agenda without breaking the law.”
There is ample evidence that many businesses in the district “unlawfully employ illegal aliens and are known to hire them on a day-to-day basis; that certain types of jobs — like day labor, landscaping, and construction — are most attractive to illegal aliens because they often do not require paperwork; that the vast majority of illegal aliens in the District come from Mexico or Central America; and that many only speak Spanish,” Sauer told the Supreme Court.
“No one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion” that someone is an illegal immigrant, the Justice Department attorney said. “But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States.”
The Supreme Court told lawyers for the immigrants to file a response by Tuesday.
The case is Noem v. Perdomo, No. 25A169.
Trump asks SCOTUS to allow profiling in California ICE raids
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let officers arrest suspected undocumented immigrants in Southern California because of how they look.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/scotus-immigration-california-20809308.php
Independent: More than 100 human rights abuses discovered in immigration detention since Trump took office, senate probe says
Report from Senator Jon Ossoff uncovers dozens of allegations, including medical mistreatment of children women and children
An investigation from the office of Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff uncovered more than 500 allegations of human rights abuses in immigration detention facilities, including more than a two dozen reports involving children and pregnant women and more than 40 instances of physical and sexual abuse.
The senator launched an investigation into conditions inside the nation’s sprawling network of immigration detention facilities after Donald Trump took office in January.
A subsequent report, first published by NBC News on Tuesday, identified 510 “credible reports” of abuse inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, federal prisons, local jails and military bases, including Guantanamo Bay, and on deportation flights.
“Credibly reported or confirmed events to date include deaths in custody, physical and sexual abuse, mistreatment of pregnant women, mistreatment of children, inadequate medical care, overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions, inadequate food or water, exposure to extreme temperatures, denial of access to attorneys, and family separations,” according to the report.
Those events include 41 allegations of physical or sexual abuse, including an alleged incident in El Paso where a detainee was “slammed against the ground, handcuffed, and taken outside” for “stepping out of line in the dining hall.”
The report also uncovered two 911 calls from a California facility referencing sexual assaults or threats of sexual assaults. At a facility in Texas, at least four emergency calls since January have reportedly referenced sexual abuse, the report found.
When a group of detainees in Miami flooded a toilet in protest of poor conditions, officers reportedly threw flash-bang grenades into the room and “shot at the men with what appeared to be pellets or rubber bullets,” according to the report. The detainees were then handcuffed with zip-ties that cut into their wrists when detainees requested food, water and medication, the report says.
The senator’s office uncovered at least 14 reports alleging pregnant women were mistreated in Homeland Security custody, “including not receiving adequate medical care and timely checkups, not receiving urgent care when needed, being denied snacks and adequate meals, and being forced to sleep on the floor due to overcrowding,” according to the report.
A pregnant woman’s partner in custody in Georgia had reported to the senator’s office that she had bled for days before staff took her to a hospital.
Once she was there, “she was reportedly left in a room, alone, to miscarry without water or medical assistance, for over 24 hours,” according to the report. According to documents obtained by NBC News, the woman received a follow-up check-up on April 9, 11 days after she miscarried.
In another case, a pregnant detainee was reportedly told to “just drink water” after requesting medical attention.
Attorneys for other detainees told the senator’s office that their pregnant clients have been forced to wait “weeks” to see a doctor while in custody.
The senator’s office also collected 18 reports involving children, including U.S. citizens, some as young as two years old.
Three of those children reportedly experienced “severe medical issues” while in detention and were denied adequate medical treatment, according to the report.
In another case, an attorney reported that a U.S. citizen child with severe medical issues was hospitalized three times while in custody with her non-citizen mother. According to the report, when the young girl began vomiting blood, the mother begged for medical attention, to which an officer reportedly told her to “just give the girl a cracker.”
A citizen child recovering from brain surgery was reportedly denied access to follow-up care, a case that was publicly reported earlier this year. She faces continued brain swelling and speech and mobility difficulties, according to the senator’s report.
Another previously reported case involving a four-year-old cancer patient is also included in the senator’s report.
“Regardless of our views on immigration policy, the American people do not support the abuse of detainees and prisoners … it’s more important than ever to shine a light on what’s happening behind bars and barbed wire, especially and most shockingly to children,” Ossoff said in a statement shared with The Independent.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told NBC News that “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.”
Detainees in ICE custody are provided with “proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members,” she said.
“Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE,” she told NBC.
The Independent has requested additional comment from Ossoff’s office and Homeland Security.
Ossoff’s report follows nearly eight months of the president’s vast anti-immigration agenda and mass deportation machine, set to receive tens of billions of dollars over the next decade to radically expand detention capacity and the number of ICE agents working to remove people from the country.
Lawsuits and reports from immigration advocates and attorneys have alleged similarly brutal conditions in facilities in California, Texas, Louisiana, New Jersey, Florida and New York, where detainees have reported food shortages, illness and denial of access to legal counsel.
Raw Story: GOP trolled as planes circle major cities with three-word taunt
Some daring pilots took to the friendly skies over the capitals of Democratic-led states Monday with a three-word taunt meant to troll President Donald Trump and Texas Republicans, according to HuffPost.
Several planes were spotted over Albany, New York; Springfield, Illinois; and Annapolis, Maryland, while trailing banners that said simply, “Mess with Texas.”
Planes towing the message were also seen over Augusta, Maine; Trenton, New Jersey; and Sacramento, California, Politico reported.
The banners were a play on the Texas slogan, “Don’t Mess With Texas,” which is seen as a declaration of state pride.
But the “anonymous group of self-described democracy advocates” altered the slogan in a plea to lawmakers in Democratic states “to help fight what many view as a gerrymandering scheme going down in Texas that will help secure Republicans’ control in the U.S. House after the midterm elections in 2026.”
Some 56 Democratic lawmakers fled Texas for blue states to prevent a quorum as Republicans sought to vote for a redistricting map that could give the GOP up to five new congressional seats. The ploy was orchestrated by President Donald Trump, who told CNBC on Tuesday that Republicans “had the right” to the seats because he swept the state so soundly in the 2024 presidential elections.
The Democrats say they’re hunkered down for the long haul away from home, even as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton issued warrants for the arrests. Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) asked the FBI to get involved in the hunt in a letter to MAGA director Kash Patel.
Tag24 News: South Park claps back after Homeland Security uses their art style to recruit ICE agents
The hit satirical show South Park recently responded after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used an image from the show to recruit Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
On Tuesday, South Park shared an X post teasing an upcoming episode, which appears to show Mr. Mackay, a teacher at South Park Elementary, working as an ICE agent after losing his job – and posing with a character that resembles DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
Hours later, DHS shared a post of an image of ICE agents drawn in the iconic South Park animation style, along with a link to a recruitment website.
In response, the South Park team shared the DHS post, along wThe back and forth comes as the show has received increased media attention after airing the season premiere of their 27th season last week, which heavily mocked President Donald Trump on a number of issues.
The White House reacted by claiming the show hasn’t been “relevant for over 20 years,” and the episode was “a desperate attempt for attention.”
DHS seems to be taking a different strategy – in a statement to Newsweek, the agency thanked South Park for “drawing attention” to ICE recruitment with the new episode, which will air Wednesday night.ith the caption, “Wait, so we ARE relevant?” and “#eatabagofd***s.”
“We are calling on patriotic Americans to help us remove murderers, gang members, pedophiles, and other violent criminals from our country,” DHS added.
LA Times: California took center stage in ICE raids, but other states saw more immigration arrests
Ever since federal immigration raids ramped up across California, triggering fierce protests that prompted President Trump to deploy troops to Los Angeles, the state has emerged as the symbolic battleground of the administration’s deportation campaign.
But even as arrests soared, California was not the epicenter of Trump’s anti-immigrant project.
In the first five months of Trump’s second term, California lagged behind the staunchly red states of Texas and Florida in the total arrests. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from the Deportation Data Project, Texas reported 26,341 arrests — nearly a quarter of all ICE arrests nationally — followed by 12,982 in Florida and 8,460 in California.
Even in June, when masked federal immigration agents swept through L.A., jumping out of vehicles to snatch people from bus stops, car washes and parking lots, California saw 3,391 undocumented immigrants arrested — more than Florida, but still only about half as many as Texas.
When factoring in population, California drops to 27th in the nation, with 217 arrests per million residents — about a quarter of Texas’ 864 arrests per million and less than half of a whole slew of states including Florida, Arkansas, Utah, Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and Nevada.
The data, released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government, excludes arrests made after June 26 and lacks identifying state details in 5% of cases. Nevertheless, it provides the most detailed look yet of national ICE operations.
Immigration experts say it is not surprising that California — home to the largest number of undocumented immigrants in the nation and the birthplace of the Chicano movement — lags behind Republican states in the total number of arrests or arrests as a percentage of the population.
“The numbers are secondary to the performative politics of the moment,” said Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement.
Part of the reason Republican-dominated states have higher arrest numbers — particularly when measured against population — is they have a longer history of working directly with ICE, and a stronger interest in collaboration. In red states from Texas to Mississippi, local law enforcement officers routinely cooperate with federal agents, either by taking on ICE duties through so-called 287(g) agreements or by identifying undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated and letting ICE into their jails and prisons.
Indeed, data show that just 7% of ICE arrests made this year in California were made through the Criminal Alien Program, an initiative that requests that local law enforcement identify undocumented immigrants in federal, state and local prisons and jails.
That’s significantly lower than the 55% of arrests in Texas and 46% in Florida made through prisons or jails. And other conservative states with smaller populations relied on the program even more heavily: 75% of ICE arrests in Alabama and 71% in Indiana took place via prisons and jails.
“State cooperation has been an important buffer in ICE arrests and ICE operations in general for years,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a Sacramento-based senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “We’ve seen that states are not only willing to cooperate with ICE, but are proactively now establishing 287(g) agreements with their local law enforcement, are naturally going to cast a wider net of enforcement in the boundaries of that state.”
While California considers only some criminal offenses, such as serious felonies, significant enough to share information with ICE; Texas and Florida are more likely to report offenses that may not be as severe, such as minor traffic infractions.
Still, even if fewer people were arrested in California than other states, it also witnessed one of the most dramatic increases in arrests in the country.
California ranked 30th in ICE arrests per million in February. By June, the state had climbed to 10th place.
ICE arrested around 8,460 immigrants across California between Jan. 20 and June 26, a 212% increase compared with the five months before Trump took office. That contrasts with a 159% increase nationally for the same period.
Much of ICE’s activity in California was hyper-focused on Greater Los Angeles: About 60% of ICE arrests in the state took place in the seven counties in and around L.A. during Trump’s first five months in office. The number of arrests in the Los Angeles area soared from 463 in January to 2,185 in June — a 372% spike, second only to New York’s 432% increase.
Even if California is not seeing the largest numbers of arrests, experts say, the dramatic increase in captures stands out from other places because of the lack of official cooperation and public hostility toward immigration agents.
“A smaller increase in a place that has very little cooperation is, in a way, more significant than seeing an increase in areas that have lots and lots of cooperation,” Kocher said.
ICE agents, Kocher said, have to work much harder to arrest immigrants in places like L.A. or California that define themselves as “sanctuary” jurisdictions and limit their cooperation with federal immigration agents.
“They really had to go out of their way,” he said.
Trump administration officials have long argued that sanctuary jurisdictions give them no choice but to round up people on the streets.
Not long after Trump won the 2024 election and the L.A. City Council voted unanimously to block any city resources from being used for immigration enforcement, incoming border enforcement advisor Tom Homan threatened an onslaught.
“If I’ve got to send twice as many officers to L.A. because we’re not getting any assistance, then that’s what we’re going to do,” Homan told Newsmax.
With limited cooperation from California jails, ICE agents went out into communities, rounding up people they suspected of being undocumented on street corners and at factories and farms.
That shift in tactics meant that immigrants with criminal convictions no longer made up the bulk of California ICE arrests. While about 66% of immigrants arrested in the first four months of the year had criminal convictions, that percentage fell to 30% in June.
The sweeping nature of the arrests drew immediate criticism as racial profiling and spawned robust community condemnation.
Some immigration experts and community activists cite the organized resistance in L.A. as another reason the numbers of ICE arrests were lower in California than in Texas and even lower than dozens of states by percentage of population.
“The reason is the resistance, organized resistance: the people who literally went to war with them in Paramount, in Compton, in Bell and Huntington Park,” said Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio Los Angeles, an independent political group that patrols neighborhoods to alert residents of immigration sweeps.
“They’ve been chased out in the different neighborhoods where we organize,” he said. “We’ve been able to mobilize the community to surround the agents when they come to kidnap people.”
In L.A., activists patrolled the streets from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week, Gochez said. They faced off with ICE agents in Home Depot parking lots and at warehouses and farms.
“We were doing everything that we could to try to keep up with the intensity of the military assault,” Gochez said. “The resistance was strong. … We’ve been able, on numerous occasions, to successfully defend the communities and drive them out of our community.”
The protests prompted Trump to deploy the National Guard and Marines in June, with the stated purpose of protecting federal buildings and personnel. But the administration’s ability to ratchet up arrests hit a roadblock on July 11. That’s when a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking immigration agents in Southern and Central California from targeting people based on race, language, vocation or location without reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.
That decision was upheld last week by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But on Thursday, the Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to lift the temporary ban on its patrols, arguing that it “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop.”
The order led to a significant drop in arrests across Los Angeles last month. But this week, federal agents carried out a series of raids at Home Depots from Westlake to Van Nuys.
Trump administration officials have indicated that the July ruling and arrest slowdown do not signal a permanent change in tactics.
“Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the communities and more work site enforcement,” Homan told reporters two weeks after the court blocked roving patrols. “Why is that? Because they won’t let one agent arrest one bad guy in the jail.”
U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who has been leading operations in California, posted a fast-moving video on X that spliced L.A. Mayor Karen Bass telling reporters that “this experiment that was practiced on the city of Los Angeles failed” with video showing him grinning. Then, as a frenetic drum and bass mix kicked in, federal agents jump out of a van and chase people.
“When you’re faced with opposition to law and order, what do you do?” Bovino wrote. “Improvise, adapt, and overcome!”
Clearly, the Trump administration is willing to expend significant resources to make California a political battleground and test case, Ruiz Soto said. The question is, at what economic and political cost?
“If they really wanted to scale up and ramp up their deportations,” Ruiz Soto said, “they could go to other places, do it more more safely, more quickly and more efficiently.”
Washington Post: Patient seeking care at NIH hospital detained by ICE
NIH officials called immigration authorities after scrutinizing the patient’s identification presented to security at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
Federal immigration authorities detained a woman seeking medical care at the National Institutes of Health’s flagship research hospital, according to an internal document and an NIH official briefed on the situation.
The woman, an existing patient, drew scrutiny at a security station to enter the campus of the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, when she handed over a state driver’s license that failed to meet new federal security ID standards.
That prompted NIH officials to check for warrants and discover she had an order for removal. They then called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The woman was to receive care through the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, according to the official and the document. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, confirmed the detainment.
“We are grateful to NIH security for apprehending an illegal alien attempting to enter the NIH campus Thursday,” Andrew Nixon, the spokesman, said in a statement. “Like any taxpayer-funded service, NIH clinical trials are for people here legally, whether they be citizens or those with proper visas that allow them to participate in clinical trials and/or treatment at the NIH. We are grateful to our law enforcement partners for acting swiftly to protect patients and staff at NIH Clinical Center.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return requests for comment.
The document and official did not have the woman’s name or the date of her detention. Details of the woman’s immigration history were not immediately available; immigration judges typically issue orders of removal after authorities present evidence that a noncitizen should be deported.
Maryland allows undocumented immigrants to receive driver’s licenses, although it’s unclear if the woman presented a Maryland license. Congress mandated that states implement Real ID, a set of security standards for driver’s licenses designed to limit forgeries. Real IDs, or other acceptable forms of identification such as passports, are needed to enter most federal buildings, according to DHS.
Hospitals have historically been considered sensitive locations off limits to immigration enforcement. When enforcement actions happen in these settings, they may deter people from seeking care, especially for people who are undocumented, immigrant advocates and health experts have said.
President Donald Trump has directed ICE to ramp up the detention and deportations of immigrants. In the early days of Trump’s second term, officials revoked a directive that had essentially prevented ICE from detaining immigrants around sensitive areas such as schools, hospitals and churches.
Matthew Lopas, director of state advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center, said incidents like the reported detention at NIH raise serious concerns about immigrant access to health care.
“Hospitals and clinics should be places of healing, not fear. This kind of enforcement does not just impact undocumented patients. It undermines public health for everyone,” said Lopas, whose organization published a guide for doctors and hospital administrators on how to protect patient rights when immigration authorities visit medical facilities.
Still, reports of ICE showing up at hospitals have been rare.
Last month, a nurses union and immigrant advocates raised concern about the presence of ICE agents who spent days at a Glendale, California, hospital seeking to detain a woman who had been hospitalized while in their custody. The woman had previously been ordered deported, DHS said.
Democratic members of Congress have introduced legislation that would largely limit immigration enforcement actions within 1,000 feet of places such as hospitals, schools and churches. But the measure is not likely to pass given Republican control of Congress.
“We need to ensure that everyone can access essential services without the threat of ICE enforcement looming over them,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Illinois), said in a statement Friday responding to the detainment at NIH.
Patient seeking care at NIH hospital detained by ICE
NIH officials called immigration authorities after scrutinizing the patient’s identification presented to security at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/08/nih-clinical-center-ice-arrest
San Francisco Chronicle: ICE is holding people in its S.F. office for days. Advocates say there are no beds, private toilets
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials handcuffed Jorge Willy Valera Chuquillanqui as he walked out of his court hearing in San Francisco recently and placed him in an eighth-floor cell at a downtown field office with no bed. He spent the next four days there with six other detainees before being sent to Fresno and eventually to a larger facility in Arizona.
“It was hell,” the 47-year-old Peruvian man said. His meals were granola bars and bean-and-cheese burritos, and at one point had to be transferred to a hospital after he started feeling pain related to a stroke he suffered a year ago.
“I’ve never experienced something like this, not even in my own country,” Valera said.
As President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts ramp up and immigration authorities strive to meet an arrest quota of 3,000 people per day, detention centers continue to fill up, leading to overcrowding in some cases. As of July 27, just under 57,000 people were being held at detention centers compared to just under 40,000 people in January, according to TRAC Immigration, a data gathering nonprofit organization.
Immigration attorneys say that as a result, they’ve seen an increase in ICE holding people at its 25 field offices across the country for extended periods of time – raising concerns that the facilities are ill-equipped for people to sleep in, and lack medical care for those who need it and privacy to use the bathroom.
The situation has prompted legal action from immigration advocates across the country. In the Bay Area, lawyers have raised concerns about the conditions of the offices as holding centers and are looking into taking legal action.
Until recently, ICE limited detentions in field offices such as that at 630 Sansome St. to 12 hours “absent exceptional circumstances,” but increased that to 72 hours earlier this year after Trump ordered mass deportations.
ICE said in a statement to the Chronicle that there are occasions where detainees might need to stay at the San Francisco field office “longer than anticipated,” but that these instances are rare.
“All detainees in ICE custody are provided ample food, regular access to phones, legal representation, as well as medical care,” the agency said. “The ICE field office in San Francisco is intended to hold aliens while they are going through the intake process. Afterwards, they are moved to a longer-term detention facility.”
ICE did not respond to questions about what kind of medical staff the agency has at its San Francisco facility, its only field office in the Bay Area. The second nearest field office is in Sacramento. Other field offices in the state are located in Los Angeles, San Diego and other parts of Southern California.
In a memorandum filed in court in June, ICE said that the agency increased its detention limit at field offices to 72 hours to meet the demands of increased enforcement. ICE stated that increased enforcement efforts have strained the agency’s efforts to find and coordinate transfers to available beds, and that it is no longer permitted to release people.
“To accommodate appropriately housing the increased number of detainees while ensuring their safety and security and avoid violation of holding facility standards and requirements, this waiver allows for aliens to be housed in a holding facility for up to, but not exceeding, 72 hours, absent exceptional circumstances,” the memorandum states.
After the passage of Trump’s policy legislation, ICE’s annual budget increased from $8 billion to about $28 billion – allowing the agency to hire more enforcement officers and double its detention space. While there are no detention centers in the Bay Area, ICE is poised to convert a 2,560-bed facility in California City (Kern County) into a holding facility. Immigrant advocates are worried that FCI Dublin, a former women’s prison that closed after a sexual abuse scandal, could be used as a detention center, but a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons told the Chronicle there are no plans to reopen the prison.
Meanwhile, some immigrant advocacy groups are starting to take action against ICE for using its field offices as holding facilities.
In Baltimore, an immigrant advocacy group filed a federal class action lawsuit in May on behalf of two women who were held at ICE’s field offices in “cage-like” holding cells for multiple days. A judge denied the group’s request for a temporary restraining order, but attorneys said they intend to try again.
“They have no beds, a lot of them have no showers, they are not equipped to provide medical care or really provide food because it’s not designed to be a long-term facility,” said Amelia Dagen, a senior attorney at Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that filed the lawsuit.
“We have heard this is not exclusive to Baltimore and is happening quite a bit in other field offices. This is an ongoing issue unfortunately because with arrest quotas being what they are… everyone is a priority,” Dagen added.
Jordan Wells, a senior staff attorney at Lawyer’s Committee For Civil Rights in San Francisco, said he and other attorneys are examining the Maryland case. Wells has filed habeas petitions on behalf of two people who were initially held at Sansome Street. A judge ordered the temporary release of one of his clients and a court hearing is scheduled for later this month for the second person, who has since been transported to a detention center in Bakersfield.
A separate class action lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security to stop raids in Los Angeles said that ICE is holding people in a short-term processing center in the city and a basement for days – describing the conditions of the “dungeon-like facilities” as “deplorable and unconstitutional.” A judge granted the temporary restraining order last week.
Immigrant advocates have criticized ICE for detaining more people than they have room for, saying that their strategy is devastating communities.
“If there is bed space ICE will fill it, and that means more terror for local communities,” said Jessica Yamane Moraga, an immigration attorney at Pangea Legal Services, which provides services to immigrants.
It remains unclear exactly how many people have been held at ICE’s San Francisco field office.
Moraga said she saw six people held at the San Francisco ICE field office for at least three days. She represented a 27-year-old Colombian woman from San Jose who was detained at the office for nearly four days.
When ICE arrests people in the Bay Area, they typically are taken to the San Francisco field office for processing and then transferred to a detention center, usually in Southern California. However, as beds fill up, many people are starting to be transferred to centers out of state.
Earlier this year, ICE started detaining people leaving their court hearings. Moraga said that when people are detained on Thursday or Friday by ICE at 630 Sansome St., which has three courtrooms and a processing center, authorities are sometimes unable to find a long-term detention facility to transport people to until after the weekend.
“ICE is deciding to use the blunt instrument of detention to turn away people who have lawful claims,” Moraga said.
Lawyers, legal advocates and migrants reported substandard conditions at ICE’s field offices.
Three days after Valera, the Peruvian migrant, was detained, Ujwala Murthy, a law student and summer intern at nonprofit Pangea Legal Services, visited him at the ICE field office.
As she was preparing to leave, she heard a loud pounding. She said she saw multiple women, apparently in detention, banging on the glass window of a door behind the front desk. A security guard came. One of the women reported that somebody was overheating. That day, it was hotter inside the field office than outdoors, she said.
Security personnel unlocked the door and Murthy said she saw a woman in a white track suit step out flushed and sweating, looking distressed. The woman was given a bottle of water and led out of Murthy’s sight.
“It made me upset,” she said. “It was very dehumanizing.”
At Valera’s asylum hearing before he was unexpectedly detained on July 25, an ICE attorney had tried to dismiss his case, part of a new Trump tactic to speed up deportations. The judge declined and continued the case to October to give Valera time to respond. But minutes after exiting the courtroom, ICE officers seized him.
In his cell at the ICE field office, he started feeling pain in the left half of his body that was paralyzed from a stroke a year ago, according to a habeas petition his attorney filed. He said he urged ICE to get him medical care and was eventually transported to San Francisco General Hospital, but returned to custody at the field office a day later.
Valera, who crossed the border in December 2022 after fleeing his home in Peru where he received death threats from an organized criminal group, was eventually transported to Fresno and then Arizona to be held in detention. He was released last month after a judge granted him a temporary restraining order.
“I’m going to ask my lawyer to help me go to therapy,” he said, “because I am traumatized.”
