U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took six people from an East Oakland home during an immigration raid Tuesday, including a 17-year-old boy and an adult with a developmental disability, according to a lawyer from a Bay Area legal assistance group.
The six, some of whom are part of the same family from Central America, were taken from the home and initially detained at the ICE field office in San Francisco before being sent to different parts of the country, said Nikolas De Bremaeker, an attorney with Centro Legal de La Raza in Oakland.
De Bremaeker said he spoke with the aunts and mother of the people arrested and was then able to talk to several of them while they were still being held in San Francisco.
“A child and a person with Down syndrome should never be detained,” De Bremaeker said. “Point blank, they should not be held in a detention center, much less in the detention center that isn’t even built to hold anyone more than a few hours.”
The conditions at the San Francisco facility are inhumane and often overcrowded, he said, with small cells, bare cement floors and exposed toilets, where detainees are given pieces of plastic to use as blankets.
De Bremaeker said none of the people he talked to have criminal records and several had pending immigration cases.
On Thursday, De Bremaeker said most were sent to Tacoma, Washington, and one was transferred to a detention center in Southern California, while the 17-year-old was sent to an ICE facility in New York state.
An ICE spokesperson Friday declined to confirm the Oakland raid or the current locations of the people De Bremaeker spoke to.
De Bremaeker also said that after he pointed out to ICE officials that the teen shouldn’t be held in the San Francisco facility, they moved the boy to an undisclosed hotel in the area, where he was held overnight with three guards and then returned to the adult detention center the next day at 5 a.m. before being shipped off to New York.
“The mother, she’s, you know, broken down. She’s completely terrified about how they are going to make ends meet, how, when she is going to see her loved ones again,” De Bremaeker said. “And it doesn’t just affect the family members of the persons who were arrested. It affects the whole immigrant community in Oakland.”
De Bremaeker said he is considering filing a motion with a federal judge to challenge the legality of the detentions.
“They’re breaking the law and the only way to address this is by bringing these petitions to the federal court, because any federal judge who looks at this immediately sees the unconstitutionality and illegality,” he said.
He said he’s also asking the city of Oakland to contribute to future legal fights given the size of the threat to the city’s immigrant community, which accounts for roughly one in three residents.
“We’re strapped for resources. We need more lawyers, paralegals and social workers to help because we’re going to see a lot more arrests,” De Bremaeker said.