On Thursday of last week as we were leading up to Pride Weekend, a Guatemalan drag performer living in SF and performing under the stage name Hilary Rivers was detained after showing up for an immigration court hearing.
We noted in our Pride Weekend roundup today that there weren’t any violent or terribly disruptive incidents at this year’s festivities, but that doesn’t mean the weekend went off without a hitch for everybody. 48 Hills had the news on Friday that an SF drag queen had been detained by ICE Thursday morning, and right on the heels of performing Wednesday at a Galería de la Raza Pride event. The performer’s stage name is Hilary Rivers (his real name is not revealed, but he uses he/him pronouns), and he’s been in the US legally with a pending asylum case. But at a regular Thursday morning scheduled immigration appointment at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency office at 630 Sansome Street, Rivers was detained and taken into custody.
The Chronicle spoke with Rivers’s attorney over the weekend, who said her client has been shipped to an ICE detention facility near Bakersfield, CA.
“It’s a complete, flagrant violation of what our asylum system was built on,” that attorney Milli Atkinson told the Chronicle. “He was doing everything, complying with every rule there could possibly be. Every day he’s been in the US has been lawful.”
This detainment follows a pattern of ICE detainings at courthouses that we’ve seen in recent months. While asylum seekers have a right to remain in the US while their cases are pending, a new tactic under the Trump administration is for the government’s attorneys to ask the judge to dismiss the case. Once the case is dismissed, the asylum rights no longer apply, and the individual can be thrown into a detention center and deported.
Rivers’s case was not dismissed. But the attorney Atkinson told the Chronicle that out of the some 20 people who've been detained by ICE in SF, only two had their cases dismissed. But ICE is still moving forward and detaining these individuals as the Trump administration races to revoke immigration rights to as large a degree as possible.
SF Pride put out a Thursday statement saying that “San Francisco Pride vehemently rejects the continued attacks on immigrant communities by the federal administration, SCOTUS rulings, and the splintering of our communities by ICE on the basis of violations to due process and our city’s sanctuary policy. San Francisco is the vibrant city we know of today because of the contributions of immigrants — especially queer immigrants.”
Galería de la Raza is hosting a Monday mobilization to benefit Rivers and his case. “We are meeting on Monday, June 30th, 2025 to come together as a community to write letters of support to be sent to Hilary,” that organization said in statement. “We will provide updates and also share Hilary’s asks and needs.”
Image: Galería de la Raza
