Earlier this week, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared on Fox News to again float the idea of blocking international arrivals at airports in so-called sanctuary cities like San Francisco. His plan would involve shutting down Customs and Border Protection checkpoints at airports like SFO, making the processing of inbound international travelers impossible.

Mullin's remarks came in response to a heated weekend of protests headlined by New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim being pepper sprayed in front of the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in Newark. As reported by The Hill, Mullin's response was to hop on Fox News on Tuesday and threaten to bring Newark and other sanctuary cities' incoming international travel to a halt.

“They’re barricading our employees from coming in and out of the facility," Mullin asserted. "Then, why are we processing international flights into the airport there? And I, we are currently — which we’re not initiating yet — but we’re currently drawing up plans to say, listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either. Because they don’t want us to enforce immigration, but they want us to process immigration at their facilities. Nothing about that makes sense to me.”

Mullin did not elaborate on how making such an unprecedented move at precisely the moment when massive travel related to June's FIFA World Cup is getting underway would, by contrast, make sense. Should this threat be put into action, SFGATE reports that up to a dozen major airports — including SFO and LAX — could be affected. This list includes "four of the 10 busiest airports in the country (O’Hare, Denver, LAX and John F. Kennedy)".

Ignoring the potential chaos and costs associated with prohibiting sanctuary city airports from accepting incoming international travelers, Reuters notes that should Mullin proceed with his plan, "it would almost certainly face immediate legal challenges."

Related: New DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin Threatens to Remove Customs From SFO, Other Sanctuary City Airports

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

The DOJ permanently closed SF’s Montgomery Street immigration court Friday, several months earlier than previously announced. Concord's already over-burdened immigration court will handle SF's cases moving forward, and hearings for those cases likely won't resume until December or later.

The DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review announced the closure of San Francisco’s Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery Street in a statement last week. As of May 1, all of SF's immigration cases will be processed through the Concord Immigration Court, which will also oversee the city’s remaining immigration court at 630 Sansome Street.

As SFist previously reported, the agency announced plans in January to close the Montgomery Street court in early 2027 with Concord's court taking over administrative duties.

The agency said in its announcement Friday that shutting down the Montgomery Street location was a “cost-saving measure.” It said hearings tied to reassigned cases will either take place in Concord or remotely, and new hearing notices will be sent out to affected immigrants and attorneys.

As KGO reports, the move combines San Francisco’s roughly 120,000 pending immigration cases with Concord’s existing backlog of about 60,000 cases, according to advocates working with immigrants in the Bay Area.

The closure follows sweeping staffing cuts to the nation’s immigration courts under the Trump administration, including the dismissal of more than 100 immigration judges nationwide and over a dozen in San Francisco, many reportedly terminated by email. The San Francisco court has gone from 22 judges in 2025 to just two, according to the SF Standard.

Concord’s court, which opened in 2024 to help relieve pressure on San Francisco’s overloaded system, has also faced staffing shortages and federal layoffs while struggling to keep up with demand.

Bill Hing, a law and migration studies professor at the University of San Francisco, told KGO that roughly 15,000 cases that were on the docket in SF are now in limbo, adding that the closure disproportionately affects asylum seekers who settle in the Bay Area while awaiting hearings.

Hing suggested the court’s higher asylum approval rates may have contributed to the DOJ's decision to shut it down.

Legal advocates say the transition has already caused confusion for immigrants trying to keep track of court dates and hearing locations, and they fear the chaos could lead to missed hearings and deportation orders.

Immigrants have received conflicting notices regarding their hearings, as some were initially informed their cases had been closed, only to be told later their hearings were simply moved, per KGO.

“They’re sending these notices out so last minute that people are not getting them in time for the hearings,” said Millie Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of SF, speaking to El Tecolote last week.

Atkinson explains that missing a hearing could result in someone losing their chance at applying for asylum. “And it can be very difficult, very expensive to try to get the case reopened by having to hire an attorney and pay all these fees,” she said.

The Concord court reportedly estimates that hearings for many SF cases may not resume until December.

Previously: Downtown San Francisco Immigration Court Set to Close In a Year

Image: Google Street View

The Trump administration was dealt another blow in federal court Tuesday with regard to its practice of rounding up and detaining undocumented immigrants who have, in some cases, lived and worked in the US for years.

A three-judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has upheld a lower court ruling in case brought on behalf of a noncitizen from Brazil, Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, who came to the US 21 years ago and applied for asylum in 2016. The judge writing for the the panel, Judge Joseph F. Bianco, in a unanimous decision, is a Trump appointee hand-picked by the Federalist Society who counts himself a strict texualist when it comes to constitutional law.

The 61-page decision reads like a full-throated rebuke of the adminstration's aggressive detention policies, saying that their argument to hold Mr. Barbosa da Cunha without a bond hearing is an "attempt to muddy these textually clear waters," and defies "longstanding executive branch practice."

"Even if the government’s newfound interpretation of Section 1225(b)(2)(A) were plausible — and it is not — we would nonetheless reject it based on our obligation to construe these statutes in a manner that would avoid the serious constitutional questions attendant to what would be the broadest mass detention-without-bond mandate in our Nation’s history for millions of noncitizens," Bianco writes.

The statute that the court refers to is one that pertains to newly arrived immigrants who are "seeking admission" to the country, which justifies mandatory detention — the government argues, without a bond hearing, indefinitely, regardless of whether the person represents a flight risk.

"Today, although we part ways with two other circuits that have addressed this question, we join the overwhelming majority of federal judges across the Nation to consider it and conclude that the government’s novel interpretation of the immigration statutes defies their plain text," Bianco writes.

And Bianco notes that the court, in this decision, is ruling solely based on the text of this one statute, and isn't addressing the larger constitutional questions about due process, etc.

A case arguing the due process issue with regard to these immigrant detentions is being argued before the (batshit insane) Fifth Circuit on Wednesday, as the New York Times notes. The Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, along with the Eighth Circuit (which covers a broad swath of the country's middle), have both recently ruled in the administration's favor with regard to immigrant detentions, even with regard to this same statute Section 1225.

The split between the appeals courts means that the Supreme Court is likely to weigh in on this issue before long.

Previously: Who Was the San Francisco Man Who Sued the US Government 131 Years Ago Over Birthright Citizenship?

Top image: Photo via Getty Images

A Salvadoran man who his lawyer says is a family man and day laborer who's engaged to a US citizen was shot by ICE agents in Patterson, California Tuesday, south of Tracy. His lawyer says it was a case of poor investigative work by ICE.

ICE says it was seeking Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez because he was wanted for questioning in connection with a murder in El Salvador, and because he is a member of the Los Angeles-based 18th Street Gang, or Barrio 18. In reality, his lawyer said, Hernandez was acquitted seven years ago in the El Salvador case, and is now engaged to be married to a California woman.

On Tuesday around 6:30 am, ICE agents performed a targeted traffic stop in Patterson, California, near an onramp to I-5, south of Tracy, which was captured on dashcam video from a nearby vehicle. In the video, you can see Hernandez in a black hatchback attempting to flee the scene, and an ICE officer opening fire into the driver's side window of the car. Hernandez was struck and injured in a scene reminiscent of the Minneapolis shooting of Renee Good, and his current condition is not known.

Similar to the Minneapolis shooting, ICE is saying that Hernandez "weaponized" his car and threatened the life of an ICE agent, however the video does not show the car directly threatening the armed ICE officer, but rather trying to get away from him.

As the New York Times reports, attorney Patrick Kolasinski gave a news briefing Wednesday with Hernandez's fiancee Cindy by his side. The couple has a small child together.

"He cannot possibly have a warrant out for his arrest in El Salvador," Kolasinski said at the news briefing, and he produced a document showing the 2019 acquittal. “That is a complete misstatement. And even if that wasn’t the case, that wouldn’t be an excuse to shoot somebody in the situation that he was in."

As KTVU notes, Kolanski initially told the media that the shooting was a case of mistaken identity, insisting that his client was not a member of any gang.

Kolanski says that, according to his fiancee, Hernandez was pulled over last Friday by Turlock police and agrressively questioned about a cracked windshield. The police took down Hernandez's information, and this likely led to the ICE incident, though there is currently no evidence that Turlock police contacted ICE.

Hernandez works on rehabbing fire-damaged homes, and was reportedly on his way to the Bay Area Tuesday morning for a job. He is a dual citizen of Mexico and El Salvador, and ICE says that he came to the US illegally in 2019.

Kolanski says he has not been able to speak with his client and is not sure of his current immigration status. Hernandez's family also says the hospital where he is being treated has not yet allowed them in to see him, and his condition is not known, per KTVU.

ICE continued to insist Wednesday, in an official statement, that Hernandez was "wanted in El Salvador for questioning in connection to a murder." It was unclear if this was the 2019 case, or some other case.

An apparent domestic violence homicide in Sunnyvale in January has been politicized by Trump's Department of Homeland Security, as the agency is seizing on the fact that the suspects arrested were both Honduran nationals who had previously been deported.

The case of the January 7 murder of 24-year-old Kembery Chirinos-Flores has taken on new political overtones this week after the Department of Homeland Security has decided to make an example of the case.

After nearly a year in which federal agents have been rounding up and deporting non-violent immigrants who were undocumented, many of whom were seeking a legal path to residency or citizenship, DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis called out the Sunnyvale case in a press release, on account of the deportation history of the two suspects arrested in early March.

"These illegal aliens should have never been able to commit these horrific killings and must NEVER be released from jail into American communities," Bis says in a statement. "Instead of cooperating with ICE, Santa Clara sanctuary politicians REFUSED to honor ICE’s arrest detainer and will not notify ICE when these murderers are released from jail. This insanity of refusing to turn cold-blooded killers over to ICE must end."

It is inaccurate to say that law enforcement in sanctuary cities do not cooperate with ICE in the case of violent criminals, but that is what is being asserted here.

DHS contends that Gerzon Chirinos-Munguia, who fathered a child with Chirinos Flores, should have been handed over to ICE after two arrests for domestic battery in April 2018 and September 2019. Chirinos-Munguia was reportedly caught entering the country illegally in May 2015 and later deported, only to reenter the country once again. And ICE reportedly issued an arrest detainer for him after the domestic battery arrests, which DHS now says was not honored by Santa Clara County law enforcement — though the circumstances and reasons for this remain unknown.

Chirinos-Munguia is accused of killing Chrinos-Flores at the Plaza Del Rey mobile home park on Vienna Drive in Sunnyvale, where he was reportedly living. She was found fatally shot in her car, apparently after driving there from Mountain View.

Chirinos-Munguia was arrested two months later along with Alfonso Inestroza, aka Franquin Inestroza-Martinez, of Hollister. Inestroza-Martinez, also a Honduran national, was deported twice between 2013 and 2018, and he is accused in the March 2025 murder of 55-year-old Esteban Vicente Sacalxot in Trenton, New Jersey. At the time of his arrest last month, he was wanted on an outstanding warrant in New Jersey.

His suspected role in the killing of Chirinos Flores is not clear.

The DHS press release lumps Inestroza-Martinez with Chirinos-Munguia, saying, "Santa Clara County sanctuary politicians refused to honor ICE detainers on two criminal illegal aliens arrested for the murder of a 24-year-old single mother in California." However, there is no mention of any detainer request for Inestroza-Martinez, and it does not appear he was arrested for any previous crime before being linked to the New Jersey homicide.

Get ready for Trump to use this case an example of Radical Left politicians gone wild in an upcoming speech, and to further distort the details of the suspects histories.

Previously: Two Men Arrested, Including Ex-Boyfriend, In Sunnyvale Killing of Young Mother

History, as we all know, never gets tired of its own repeats, and much like Trump and his ilk want to say the 14th Amendment doesn't apply to brown people, government officials tried to say it didn't apply to Chinese Americans either, over a century ago.

At the center of Wednesday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court, discussing the constitutionality of President Trump's racist-on-its-face executive order last year barring birthright citizenship for undocumented migrants' children, is an 1898 Supreme Court case involving a young Chinese American man who was born in San Francisco.

Wong Kim Ark's name was evoked again today, 128 years later, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh and others asked attorneys why that precedent should not stand. Wong was asking the court the same question that the ACLU's attorney Cecillia Wang was asking today, which is how the 14th Amendment's language guaranteeing citizenship for all who are born here does not apply to a particular group of people.

Wong Kim Ark was a cook in San Francisco's Chinatown, and as the New York Times recounts today, he was just 24 years old when he sued the US government for denying him reentry to the country he was born in — this was after he traveled to China multiple times and attempted to return to San Francisco in 1895.

He was, as the story goes, born to a woman with bound feet in the back bedroom of an apartment at 751 Sacramento Street in 1870. According to US Census records, such as they are, Wong Kim Ark was one of just 518 babies of Chinese ancestry born in the US up until that time. His parents decided to return to China in 1877, not long after a white mob ransacked SF's Chinatown on the night of July 24, 1877, an event that was covered in newspapers across the country.

Wong returned in 1880 at the age of 10, with an uncle, and started working as a dishwasher, going with the uncle to a mining camp in the Sierra. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act two years later, explicitly barring more immigrants from China, and as The American Scholar recounts, this meant that by the time Wong reached marrying age, there were few women of Chinese descent around his age in the Bay Area. This meant traveling back to China to find a wife, conceiving a child with a girl who was 17, and then returning to California to find more work, multiple times.

He was bilingual, and fluent in English, as an immigration interviewer would later note. And for much of his life in the US, he had to carry around documents, including letters in which white people attested to the fact that he was born in the US, to prove his citizenship.

It was after his ninth trip back to China, in August 1895, that Wong was given trouble re-entering the US. He was detained, like many migrants are today, forced to live on a steamship in San Francisco Bay for four months before being released on bail. He then worked at a restaurant in Chinatown while his case made its way through the courts. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1898, after his attorney argued that birthright citizenship was essential for everyone arriving here — including the many hundreds of thousands of white European immigrants arriving every year.

And Wong's troubles didn't end there. He relocated to Texas, where he was again jailed and accused of being a non-citizen in El Paso. And 12 years later, his eldest son tried unsuccessfully to enter the country at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay — the so-called "Ellis Island of the West" — only to get turned away after immigration officials refused to believe that he was, in fact, Wong's biological son.

A man who purported to be Wong's third son, Wong Yook Sue, entered the country at Angel Island and successfully claimed citizenship in 1924 — he would later admit to having been a "paper son," and unreleated to Wong Kim Ark, only using his name to enter the country. And then another, actual descendent, Wong Yook Jim, arrived two years later, at age 11 — and both scholars and the family now believe that he was Wong Kim Ark's grandson, though he claimed to be his youngest son.

Wong Yook Jim would later marry a Japanese American woman and have a family that was raised in San Francisco. His son, Norman Wong, was at the Supreme Court today and tells the New York Times, "They will be shamed for history if they get this wrong."

The descendants of Wong Kim Ark tell the Times that their father never told them about their ancestor's important legacy. They only learned of the connection about 15 years ago, after their father died.

Norman Wong, who attended UC Berkeley and grew up only knowing he was American, tells the Times, "If he had not fought for that right, I probably wouldn’t have existed."

Related: Ninth Circuit Shuts Down Trump's Executive Order on Birthright Citizenship, Setting Up Supreme Court Showdown

Top image: Wong Kim Ark in 1901. National Archive photo courtesy of Amanda Frost

We now have a fuller picture of what went down at Gate E2 at SFO's Terminal 3 on Sunday night, how ICE agents ended up there, and what happened with the woman afterwards.

Initial reporting around a viral incident Sunday at SFO was confusing as to how and why a woman and her nine-year-old daughter came to be targeted by ICE agents near a boarding gate, and how the scene became so dramatic with the woman in tears and apparently resisting the officers — all while onlookers chanted "Shame!" and San Francisco police provided crowd control.

A statement from an airport spokesperson, saying that "federal officers were transporting two individuals on an outbound flight when this incident occurred," turns out to have been factually incorrect, as were some subsequent reports about the incident.

The New York Times has come through with some better reporting, identifying the woman who was detained as Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, an immigrant from Guatelama who first came to the US with her daughter, who was then a toddler, during Trump's first term, in April 2018. We don't know anything about Lopez-Jimenez's story beyond the fact that she was picked up by federal agents near a port of entry at San Luis, Arizona. She was photographed, fingerprinted, and released with a court date for a removal hearing.

Per the Times, Lopez-Jimenez showed up for some court dates, but missed others, and she was absent when an immigration judge ordered her deportation on May 8, 2019.

We don't know anything else about her case, except that she later ended up in the Bay Area. And as the Times notes, she may not even have been aware that there was a deportation order out there. She had been living with her daughter in Contra Costa County, and the two were intending to fly to Miami on Sunday to visit a relative.

The reason ICE found her at SFO is, as the New York Times reports, because TSA had flagged her in its boarding logs, and alerted ICE that she would be there. She was reportedly approached by a plainclothed agent who asked her name, and then asked to see her passports, both from Guatemala. According to the reporting, other agents approached, and they asked her to follow them to the International Terminal, and at that point she attempted to run — clearly out of desperation, given that she had her daughter in tow.

This was the moment where onlookers began taking video showing Lopez-Jimenez in tears, being restrained, because she apparently was wriggling and making it difficult for the officers to get handcuffs on her.

The Times tracked Lopez-Jimenez's arrest and deportation from there, saying that she was arrested just before 11 pm Sunday at SFO. By 7:50 pm Monday, she was in McAllen, Texas, at the McAllen Plaza Hotel and Suites, and by 3 am Tuesday she was already checked out, headed for an 8 am flight out of Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, bound for Guatemala.

It certainly seems like a whole lot of expense, trauma, and effort just to target a woman with no criminal record, and her nine-year-old daughter, and make sure they got out of the country.

"These are not the violent criminals that the Trump administration talks about,” said Nancy Tung, chairwoman of the San Francisco Democratic Party, speaking to the Times. “It’s just wrong.” Tung also serves on the SF Airport Commission.

Tung noted that this shows how TSA databases are now a tool for ICE, and that domestic terminals at airports are now places where ICE agents are hunting down undocumented individuals if they are trying to board planes.

Previously: ICE Not Deployed to Assist TSA at SFO, But They Were There Arresting Someone Sunday Night

A witness at SFO Sunday filed a complaint that SFPD officers violated sanctuary laws by shielding ICE agents in plainclothes from bystanders who were asking them to identify themselves, as the ICE agents attempted to restrain a woman being deported with her young daughter.

Witness Nicole Killian filed a complaint with the California Department of Justice and the SF City Attorney, as Mission Local reports, alleging that SFPD officers assisted ICE agents who were restraining a mother and her daughter at San Francisco International Airport Sunday as they were being deported to Guatemala.

Attorneys knowledgeable about local sanctuary policies told Mission Local the actions of SFPD officers may have violated SF’s sanctuary ordinance as well as SFPD’s policy directives.

As SFist reported Monday, the arrest was not related to President Donald Trump’s recent directive to send ICE agents to some US airports amid the partial government shutdown — and SFO employs private contractors to manage security checkpoints, so therefore doesn't rely on federal TSA employees.

The Chronicle reports that the woman being restrained, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, had tried to escape custody, and officials said she may have been detained elsewhere and was being transported through SFO. An immigration judge had reportedly issued a final order for Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter’s deportation seven years ago, in 2019.

Mission Local reports that a total of 20 SFPD officers were on the scene of the arrest. A group of bystanders filmed police officers forming a buffer around ICE agents in plainclothes, who witnesses say refused to identify themselves. SFPD officers were also filmed escorting ICE agents as they transported the woman in a wheelchair away from the scene.

SFPD released a statement that officers were responding to a 911 call about the incident, and they stayed on the scene to “maintain public safety.”

“The crowd was furious, but was giving them their distance and was only asking reasonable questions about the identification and documenting what was happening,” Killian told Mission Local. “I was like, you’re not supposed to be helping, but if you’re allowed to crowd control, how is that not helping them?”

Grisel Ruiz, ​​the senior managing attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, pointed out that SFPD’s crowd control role amounted to providing resources that supported ICE operations.

“Creating a perimeter around an ICE arrest to keep the public at a distance so that ICE can conduct an arrest appears to be the SFPD using its resources to support an ICE arrest,” Ruiz told Mission Local.

Bill Ong Hing, a longtime immigration attorney, professor of law at University of San Francisco, and a former police commissioner, told Mission Local that SFPD is only allowed to assist ICE in an emergency or if the public potentially poses harm to ICE agents. Otherwise, police may have violated both the city's ordinance and SFPD’s directive.

“SFPD may argue [the woman being arrested] created a situation where there was a danger to the public," Hing says.

Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney at the San Francisco public defender’s office, told Mission Local, “It does not appear there is any crime being committed by any members of the public.”

“A dozen officers stand in a circle to help officials to take or keep someone in custody, that seems to fit the definition of ‘assisting,'” Chan said, calling the incident “alarming and horrifying.”

Previously: ICE Not Deployed to Assist TSA at SFO, But They Were There Arresting Someone Sunday Night

Image: din_jarring/Reddit

ICE agents are not be getting deployed at SFO as they are at other airports to assist TSA agents amid the partial government shutdown, but they were there on Sunday anyway, conducting an arrest.

News came out Sunday that President Trump was seeking to solve the problem of TSA agent shortages at US airports — caused by the impasse in Congress over the funding of ICE, which has impacted the paychecks of TSA agents but not ICE agents — by deploying ICE agents to TSA checkpoints. This will likely create new nightmares on its own, however for now, the Bay Area is being spared this particular deployment.

As ABC News is reporting Monday, ICE agents are being sent to 14 airports around the country that have seen the highest rates of TSA agents calling in sick, and neither SFO nor Oakland Airport is on the list. The list includes major hubs like Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, Chicago O'Hare, Phoenix, Houston's Bush Intercontinental, and JFK, as well as airports in New Orleans, Cleveland, and Fort Meyers, Florida.

The list of airports where ICE is coming is reportedly "subject to change."

Still, ICE agents were present at SFO on Sunday, with a post on Reddit Sunday night linking a deportation arrest caught on video to the Trump announcement, saying "ICE already causing havoc at SFO."

As KTVU reports, ICE agents were at the airport on an unrelated matter, and airport officials confirmed that they conducted the arrest in the secure area of Terminal 3.

A crying woman could be seen being forcibly handcuffed in the video, which said the arrest occurred around 10 pm near Gate E2.

A young girl was reportedly also taken into custody with the woman.

"We understand federal officers were transporting two individuals on an outbound flight when this incident occurred," said SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel in an email to KTVU. "We believe this is an isolated incident and have no reason to suspect broader enforcement action at SFO."

Regarding the use of ICE agents to perform the functions of TSA agents at airports, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told ABC 7 Sunday, "It's completely wrong.  ICE agents are not trained for the job they have now."

Update: The Chronicle adds the detail that SFO is one of around 20 airports in the country that employs private contractors to staff security checkpoints, rather than federal TSA employees, so therefore it is not impacted during government shutdowns.

Also, according to state Senator Scott Wiener, the woman seen crying and being held down near a boarding gate at SFO was being put on a plane with her daughter to be forcibly deported, and reportedly she did get on the plane.

Photo by Duke Cullinan

ICE deported a six-year-old deaf boy from Hayward along with his mom and brother, but Eric Swalwell is trying to win the return of this family of three, and his staff did at least get the kid his hearing aids.

We reported last week on the story of Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, a single mom from Colombia who has living here in Hayward with her five- and six-year-old boys. The seven-year-old is deaf, which makes it particularly heartbreaking that the whole family was detained, arrested, and deported back to Colombia last Tuesday during a routine check-in at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Tehama Street And further, the deaf son was not allowed to take his hearing aid with him.

Now this week, KGO reports that the district’s congressman (and gubernatorial candidate) Eric Swalwell is now getting involved. Swalwell has staffers on the ground in Colombia, who brought the deaf boy his hearing aid.

"As we stand here, my staff has just landed in Colombia and is placing the hearing devices back in the boy's ear," Swalwell said at a Monday press conference. "To the child we have returned his sound, but to our nation, what has happened to our soul."

"If you want to deport a cartel boss, everyone here will help you pack their bags," Swalwell added. "But if you're coming for a 6-year-old, you have to go through us...How does ruining the life of a 6-year-old deaf child make our community or our country any safer? It doesn't, it makes the country darker."

For their part, ICE gave a statement to KRON on why they deported the Gutierrez family. ICE claims the family entered the country illegally in 2022, that a judge ordered them removed as of June 24, 2024, and that the mother refused to comply with "multiple directives" to leave the country.

Gutierrez said last week that she had fled Colombia four years ago in order to flee an ex-boyfriend with whom she was in an abusive relationship, and who was linked to a violent street gang.

Related: Hayward Family of Three Deported at Routine SF Immigration Check-in, Including Deaf Six-Year-Old Boy

Image Courtesy Family Of Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez

More pointless cruelty in the SF immigration courts under Trump, as a mother and her two kids, one of them deaf, checked in for their SF immigration appointment and were heartlessly shipped to Colombia.

It's another story of immigrants very much attempting to play by the rules to establish their citizenship status, but the Trump administration cruelly just shipping them off to secret detention centers. The Chronicle has the story of Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, a mother of a five- and seven-year-old (who happens to be deaf) who reported Tuesday for her required check-in at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Tehama Street. But the entire family of three was detained, arrested, and deported including the deaf seven-year-old, who is without his hearing aids. The family’s attorney says they’ve been given the runaround, with inaccurate information about where the family is now.

“This obfuscation, this false information, these different stories for different people — it’s just chaos at best and intentional,” Centro Legal de la Raza immigration attorney Nikolas De Bremaeker told the Chronicle. “The fact that she has a severely disabled child … is very strong humanitarian grounds to not deport a 7-year-old.”

Per the Chronicle's Thursday reporting, the attorneys “can’t find them” and "ICE officials have given attorneys and Gutierrez’s family confusing and false information about which detention center Gutierrez was sent to." KTVU has some later Thursday reporting saying that the family was deported to Colombia, though that information is not confirmed, as no one has been able to contact the Gutierrez family.

The Gutierrez family is from Colombia, though have been living in Hayward for about four years since Lesly fled Colombia to escape an abusive relationship with a man she says was involved with a violent gang.

"She was afraid her ex-partner would harm her and her two children," one of her relatives told KTVU through an interpreter. "He was part of a gang in the city that committed murders and robberies. We had already received several threats from him."

De Bremaeker says he will continue to file emergency appeals through the weekend.

Related: Undocumented Immigrant Detained by ICE in Front of Home in San Jose [SFist]

Image Courtesy Family Of Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez

The latest ‘Show me your papers’ bully move from the Trump administration seems to want immigrants out of any supportive housing that receives federal funding, and they're demanding citizenship checks of Section 8 residents.  

With the Trump administration, there’s always the old rule of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) that softens the blow of his worst threats. But there’s a new threat that seems very real, and very scary for San Francisco’s working class immigrant community, as the Chronicle reports that the Trump administration is now demanding citizenship checks for anyone living in low-income public housing.

The order came down quickly and with an unforgiving, tight deadline. Per the Chron, one housing nonprofit “confirmed that some of the organization’s tenants were contacted last week and told they had to turn over certain documents within 15 days.” But they’re also squeezing the government agencies, as the Chron adds that the San Francisco Housing Authority was given a list of tenants and a demand that the agency report back on their citizenship status within 15 days.

The Chron also confirmed that the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development said that their agency “and others across the country received similar letters from HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] last month.” So this is not just a San Francisco thing, and local affordable housing administrators are absolutely frightened.

“All of us have thousands of tenants — families, seniors, formerly homeless individuals that we are responsible for sheltering, and all of us are terrified,” affordable housing nonprofit Mission Housing’s executive director Sam Moss told the Chronicle. “It’s hard not to be worried that the nonprofit affordable housing industry will be given an impossible mandate in an effort to further hurt our low-income immigrant communities.”

SF Government officials are sounding a less alarming tone, whether that’s justified or not.

“This list reflects a small percentage of total Section 8 households in San Francisco,” Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development spokesperson Anne Stanley said to the Chron, without delving into specific numbers.

And this could all be a scare tactic. The Chronicle notes that HUD declined to answer any specific questions on how all of this would work.

Or it could be a prelude to something larger and more horrible, affecting even non-immigant residents of public housing. The Trump administration could be using this as a tactic to defund federally supported Section 8 housing completely, a move that would likely create millions of new homeless Americans practically overnight.

Related: Faith Leaders Arrested After Dozens Chain Themselves Outside SF Immigration Court [SFist]

Image: Google Street View

Some hastily put together, pro-ICE electronic billboard ads, paid for by a shady outfit with no known donors, have appeared in San Francisco ahead of the Super Bowl, and maybe in other cities as well.

If there is some contingent of Americans who are still on the fence about the immigration-enforcement/citizen-harassment and killing actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, they are likely still in their cabins in the woods or under a rock, and not visiting San Francisco for Super Bowl Week.

But a group calling themselves American Sovereignty, with no on-the-record spokesperson or disclosed donors, has launched what they say is a multi-million-dollar ad campaign in a questionable effort to bolster public perception of ICE agents. It's a version of crisis PR — and not a particularly good one! — at a moment when public opinion of ICE is reaching new lows. (There are still, disturbingly, 37% of respondents to that poll who say ICE's recent actions are "about right" or "not enough.")

The ads, as KRON4 and others have reported, began appearing in recent days on at least one electronic billboard near Fisherman's Wharf, and include messages — alongside stock imagery — apparently tailored to Super Bowl Week, like "Cheering because the home team finally started investing in defense," and "Defensive Player of the Year: ICE."

Fox News had the "exclusive" news about the ad campaign last week.

There are narrated TV spots as well, one of which has the message, "They're friends and neighbors. Sons, fathers. They’re Little League coaches and veterans. They’re people who love this country."

And there's the one seen below promoting Trump's spurious narrative that only criminals are being targeted by ICE agents. It's unclear if these have appeared on TV anywhere, and that particular video has only gotten 682 views since it was posted three days ago.

As Daily Kos notes, American Sovereignty's official website has no listing of donors, directors, or spokespersons, just an email signup form. And the Fox News story doesn't contain any statement from the group or any direct quote from a person connected to the group. The group claims that the TV spots will be targeting Washington, DC; Michigan; North Carolina; and Georgia.

It could be that this campaign is for San Francisco's sake only, during the Super Bowl, and that it isn't a multi-million-dollar one at all.

The American Sovereignty X account only appears to be a few weeks old, has a mere  189 followers, and the only evidence of the billboards that they've documented are the ones at that one corner near Fisherman's Wharf.

On the American Sovereignty website, the group says, "Our mission is to strengthen border security, end trafficking and cartel exploitation, and close loopholes that reward unlawful entry."

Related: Emeryville Protesters Storm Home Depot and Target to Pressure Them Against Cooperating With ICE

Were it not for a last-minute reversal by President Trump, brokered in secret by a couple of billionaires and SF's mayor, San Francisco and Oakland could have easily descended into the same violent chaos, provoked by an ICE invasion, that we're seeing in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration has, since Trump took office this second shameful time, been working their way down a list of enemy states and cities where federal agents have been sent in on a draconian mission to arrest as many Latino people as possible. This same kind of aggression isn't happening in Republican-leaning Texas or Florida, which also have huge numbers of undocumented immigrants. But it's happening in the places that largely aren't grateful for Trump being in the White House: Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and now Minneapolis.

San Francisco and the Bay Area have seen a modicum of ICE activity since early last year, and some small protests have broken out around ICE's headquarters and the immigration court on Sansome Street. But we haven't seen anything like the continued, vengeful onslaught of masked federal agents that Minneapolis — a city about half the size of San Francisco, with a much smaller immigrant community — has seen over the last two months.

The federal government doesn't have the resources to conduct such an onslaught everywhere all at once, and ICE agents have been moving, at Trump's whim, from locale to locale — with an aggressive hiring push that has reportedly added 12,000 new ICE agents to the training rolls in the last four months.

It's easy to see how San Francisco escaped the crosshairs by mere hours back in October, in some late-night conversations Trump reportedly had with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SF Mayor Daniel Lurie, not necessarily in that order. With 100 federal border patrol agents reportedly set to begin staging for a "surge" at a Coast Guard base in Alameda on Thursday, October 23, and some unknown number of ICE agents likely to follow them, these men got the president on the phone and convinced him to call off his goons.

We don't know what was said exactly in the Lurie phone call — Lurie told us that Thursday morning only that he'd spoken to Trump and told him "San Francisco is on the rise" and "the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong." — and there may be some pending legal action to get a transcript of the phone call.

But seeing what has unfolded in Minneapolis, with ICE perhaps learning new tactics since its "surge" last June in Los Angeles, it is easy to imagine that we could have seen similar bloodshed of innocent protesters, if not far worse, should the battle have come to the Bay Area in October.

Minneapolis residents still have the George Floyd protests of 2020 fresh in their memory, but the Bay Area has an even deeper and longer tradition of protest and the anarchic, mostly message-free chaos that can accompany it, to which a federal brigade would likely react with increasing escalation.

As Minneapolis Chief of Police Brian O'Hara told the New York Times' Daily podcast following the murder of Renee Good, Minneapolis police have been working for the last five years to regain the public's trust, and to train heavily in de-escalation techniques. And here you have federal agents, many of them clearly poorly trained, with zero sense of how to de-escalate fraught situations.

That point was proven again on Saturday with the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by an ICE agent, in a chaotic scuffle in which agents appeared to have fired their weapons indiscriminately, all after one of them shouted about Pretti having a weapon — which video shows he did not touch.

Even without Trump's "surge" kicking off here in the Bay Area, a day of scant protest ended in a bizarre and also chaotic scene outside the Coast Guard base in Alameda, in which Coast Guard security personnel fired shots at a U-Haul that was driving toward them in the area of the protest — and the full details of what prompted this situation remain unclear. Two people, including the U-Haul driver, were injured in the incident.

The point being, when tensions are high, when armed agents are involved, and when impassioned individuals start expressing their passions in the face of those armed agents, the guns quickly come out, and people can get hurt. People also get hurt simply because situations become volatile, or confusing, and untrained officers resort to using guns.

Many, many people foresaw the terrible outcomes if that surge had gone forward in the Bay Area, and even activists were trying to warn each other to remain calm and keep from getting hurt. Chances are, if it were here, it would have been uglier, and bloodier.

And there is nothing keeping the administration from turning their attention back here, and to California generally — especially when Governor Gavin Newsom makes his 2028 presidential campaign official and starts grabbing more of the spotlight. So we should all take heed from Minneapolis and prepare ourselves, just in case.

The Trump administration will, in the way of fascists, continue to try to blame the protesters, blame Democrats, and cast ICE agents as heroes. Keep using your own eyes and ears, though. Keep telling your Trump-voting relatives to use theirs. This is all far from over.

Top image: Demonstrators protests ICE operations and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on January 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pretti, an ICU nurse at a VA medical center, died yesterday after being shot multiple times during a brief altercation with border patrol agents in the Eat Street district of Minneapolis. Good was killed by an ICE agent on January 7. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors will vote on a measure that would set “ICE-free zones” where ICE agents would not be allowed to set foot. But it remains to be seen whether any of this is even legally enforceable.  

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not having a good week from a public relations standpoint. There was of course last week’s fatal shooting of innocent mom Renee Good in Minneapolis, which has played poorly in the court of public opinion for obvious reasons. On Wednesday, ICE agents tear-gassed a Minneapolis family driving with their six children. And recent polling says that for the first time ever, more Americans want to abolish ICE than those who think ICE should be kept around.  

Alameda County may abolish ICE, at least in parts of the county. KTVU reports that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors will vote on whether to establish “ICE-free zones” on any county-owned property, where ICE agents theoretically would not be allowed to set foot or carry out any operations.  

"This proposal for ICE-free zones will ensure that parking lots, parking garages, vacant lots, non public areas of our buildings cannot be used for federal immigration enforcement," Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas said . "For our county owned and county controlled property and any non-public areas of our building, they will not be authorized to do federal immigration enforcement."

But can they really do this? The reality is that other municipalities have, but this is completely legally untested territory. LA County voted to create ICE-free zones this week. Santa Clara County passed their own similar “ICE-free zone” legislation in December, barring ICE agents from city- and county-owned parking lots, garages and other lands.

Santa Clara County, is of course, home to Levi’s Stadium where the Super Bowl is being played in three weeks, and where some World Cup matches will be played in just five months. So wait a minute… does that mean Levi’s Stadium would be an ICE-free zone during those events?

Legally, yes! Levi’s Stadium is technically owned by the City of Santa Clara, albeit through a body called the Santa Clara Stadium Authority. So if ICE agents did show up at the Super Bowl or World Cup trying to snatch people, the city or county could try to test the boundaries of their ICE-free zone legislation. And we could see a high-profile conflict that really has no precedent in sports, law enforcement, or anything really in recent US history.

But that’s all just theoretical. On an immediate practical level, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors could be voting on their ICE-free zone resolution as early as this Tuesday, January 20.    

Related: Scott Wiener’s Law Banning ICE Agents From Wearing Masks Takes Effect Thursday. Will ICE Abide? [SFist]

Image: MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - JANUARY 08: (EDITOR'S NOTE: This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images' editorial policy.) People march during a protest after the killing of Renee Nicole Good on January 08, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. According to federal officials, an ICE agent shot and killed Good during a confrontation yesterday in south Minneapolis. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)