FAMILIES PREPARING PLANS FOR ICE RAIDS
Some say immigration agents used fear tactics during a recent four-day Bay Area sweep
SAN JOSE >> Miguel Rico’s worst fear is getting separated from his three children. Following a fourday ICE sweep across Northern California, the Mexican immigrant has reason to worry.
“When you hear the news you get scared, especially if you have young kids,” he said. “But at the same time, we have to look for options and we have to be prepared. Information is the best way to be prepared.”
Amid ICE sweeps across the Bay Area and a war raging between federal immigration officials and California leaders determined to protect their residents, Rico and about 30 other South Bay residents gathered at the immigrant rights organization SIREN Thursday evening for a lesson on how to create emergency plans in case they or a family member is detained by ICE.
The plans include details on everything from who will look after their children and their pets if they’re detained to what they’ll do with their homes, what clothes they’ll pack and where they’ll stow emergency cash and important documents. It’s a phenomenon that’s become increasingly common amongst Dreamers and undocumented families as they prepare for the unrelenting immigration enforcement that ICE has promised in the nation’s only sanctuary state.
That enforcement continued this week with the confirmed arrests of 232 undocumented immigrants across the Bay Area and beyond. But not before Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned residents of the impending raids — a risky move that drew outrage from the Trump administration and that launched a review by the Department of Justice. ICE Deputy Director Thomas Homan said Schaaf’s “reckless” warning helped more than 850 others to avoid capture.
“The Oakland mayor’s decision to publicize her suspicions about ICE operations further increased that risk for my officers and alerted criminal aliens — making clear that this reckless decision was based on her political agenda with the very federal laws that ICE is sworn to uphold,” said Homan during a Fox News interview earlier this week.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters in a briefing Thursday, “it’s outrageous that a mayor would circumvent federal authorities and certainly put them in danger by making a move such as that.”
The emergency planning workshop at SIREN was the first of its kind, but organizers said they plan to host more in the following weeks.
“This is our way to respond to all the ICE activity that’s been happening,” said Erica Leyva, a community organizer with SIREN who helped lead the workshop. “We want to prepare our families with how to deal with a situation in which a family member is detained by ICE so that they’re aware of their options and what to do with their children.”
All of the other families in attendance declined interviews Thursday, and organizers with SIREN closed off the workshop to media because they wanted to ensure the families felt they were in a safe space, they said.
Activists say fears are at an alltime high in immigrant communities across the country. An estimated 150 calls of reported ICE sightings in San Jose came into Santa Clara County’s Rapid Response Network in just 48 hours, the group said Thursday. The network, a collaboration of several advocacy organizations, said it confirmed seven people were detained by immigration officers in San Jose in recent days and that others may have been arrested.
Meanwhile, organizers with the Rapid Response Network of Northern California on Friday said ICE agents used fear tactics during the four-day sweep and prevented would-be attorneys from accessing their clients.
On Wednesday, the last day
of the Bay Area ICE operation, the agency refused to provide attorneys who visited the ICE office in San Francisco with information about specific people it detained and updates about deportation actions, the network said in a news release.
The group also said ICE transferred people to detention facilities outside Northern California — making it extremely difficult for attorneys and family members to access these immigrants — and in some cases rapidly deported several people, some within hours of their arrests, they said.
ICE has denied the accusations. “ICE’s career law enforcement professionals are charged with enforcing immigration laws passed by Congress, and recent operations in the Bay Area were consistent with ICE’s lawful mission,” the agency said in a statement in response to the allegations earlier this week. “ICE respects the rights of all aliens in removal proceedings to hire and consult with a lawyer of their choice and has policies in place to ensure that aliens may do so to the extent required by federal law.”