SF demands answers for SFPD and ICE’s airport abduction

SFPD stood guard for ICE. City residents demand answers. As videos spread of ICE agents forcibly seizing a mother and her young daughter at SFO, community members and attorneys were outraged by SFPD’s complicity and violation of the city’s sanctuary ordinance. 

On Wednesday, the FREE SF coalition filed a complaint against SFPD with the Department of Police Accountability, as well as a public records request seeking any communication between ICE and SFPD related to the violent arrest on Sunday. 

As residents chanted “ICE out of SF! ICE out of airports!” in front of the SFPD headquarters, Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney in the SF Public Defender’s Office, explained:

What happened at SFO last Sunday night was nothing short of horrifying. What pushed this from horrific to infuriating to enraging was what surrounded them. A wall of SFPD officers shielding ICE as if it was their job to protect federal agents instead of the people of San Francisco…You don’t need a law degree to understand SFPD violated state and local sanctuary laws that night. They were there to protect ICE. They were not there to protect the mom or her little girl who were being abducted in the middle of the airport.

The police department has 10 days to respond to the public records request. Find more coverage of the community rally and demands for answers from ABC, CBS, NBC, KTVU, KTSF, Telemundo, KQED, KALW, KPFA (49:40), BCN, and Gazetteer. 

Also available: Event photos (credit: Fernando Antunez) and the full text of the public records request.

Sheriffs under fire for ICE transfers, acquiescence to private ICE contractors. As SFPD faces residents’ outrage, sheriff’s offices in San Diego and Orange County are under fire for aiding mass detention and deportation. 

A CalMatters investigation uncovered that the San Diego Sheriff’s Office “failed to investigate at least seven reported sexual assaults” at the Otay Mesa ICE detention center in 2025 and “has ceded control of the cases to civilian administrators employed by [CoreCivic], the nation’s largest for-profit prison contractor.” 

Later the same day, community members and county supervisors spoke out against dozens of ICE transfers from county jails facilitated by the SD Sheriff’s Office as well as the sheriff’s failure to fulfill basic duties of investigation and protection. In response, the sheriff said that “to investigate every crime or every sexual assault that potentially or is alleged in another facility in this county is a difficult ask.” 

Meanwhile, in Orange County, a new report from the Harbor Institute found that the Sheriff’s Department transferred 271 community members to ICE in 2025, disproportionately impacting Mexican and Vietnamese residents, including people with low-level charges and decades-old convictions. Read the report. 

‘Prying open the black box.’ As Columbia Journalism Review dives into ICE’s efforts to “conceal the breadth of its detention network,” outlets like Mission Local are exposing that ICE  agents have captured hundreds of community members in routine, closed-door immigration appointments. 

Nationally, organizations like Freedom for Immigrants are launching new data and mapping projects to “track U.S. detention centers and connect families to resources,” as Prism reports. Gillian Wenhold at Freedom for Immigrants told Prism, “detention operates through speed, confusion, [and] isolation, and so the role of this map is to try and interrupt that by centralizing the information that people will need.” 

And, as philanthropic leaders call on their peers to address mass incarceration and mass deportation together, a new report exposes how California spends up to $300 million each year incarcerating 740 elders in the state’s women’s prisons. Co-led by ICE Out of CA member California Coalition for Women Prisoners, the report also analyzes pathways to safely bring elders home to their loved ones. Read more from The Appeal. 

For more updates on how Californians are standing up for due process and safety, follow ICE Out of California on Bluesky.