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San Francisco Chronicle​

What happens after Bay Area immigrants are arrested by ICE?

Just before 10 p.m. on July 4, which is typically a court holiday, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered immigration agents to release a Peruvian woman they had seized outside the courthouse a day earlier. Frescia Garro Pinchi arrived in the United States two years ago seeking political asylum, saying she would face persecution if returned to Peru. Now 27 and living in Hayward, she has no criminal record, has serious medical conditions, is working and raising a family, and posed no apparent threat to society when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested her after a hearing in immigration court, said U.S. District Judge Rita Lin. They took her to an ICE detention center in San Francisco, then, according to her lawyer, shackled her by hand and foot and drove her nearly 300 miles to ICE's Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield, run by GEO Group, a private prison company that is the largest detention provider for ICE with about 22,000 beds at 20 ICE facilities nationwide. Lin said she was joining 'a series of other District Courts' in requiring the government to seek approval from a 'neutral decision-maker' before arresting non-citizens who have been on longstanding release while seeking legal U.S. residency. Abby Sullivan Engen, the woman's attorney, said the action was the result of the Trump administration's order to arrest 3,000 immigrants every day. The woman is one of at least 30 migrants who've been arrested at their immigration hearings in San Francisco in a new Trump administration tactic to ramp up mass deportations of the nation's approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants. Immigrants arrested by ICE are held, usually for many months, in sites that are even less subject to outside inspection or regulation than jails or prisons. Bay Area detainees are typically taken to Mesa Verde in Bakersfield and the nearby Golden Gate Annex, where conditions were criticized in a May 2025 report by state Attorney General Rob Bonta's office. Few doctors are available to provide medical or mental health care. Detainees can be visited by family and friends, but some say they have been denied access to their lawyers. And those who file complaints about their treatment risk being punished – in some cases, by shipment to detention centers hundreds or thousands of miles away, according to the report. About 86% of people detained by ICE are held in for-profit facilities, according to the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, which analyzes federal immigration data. Immigrant advocates have voiced concern over conditions in overcrowded ICE detention facilities as the Trump administration detained a record 58,000 people as of June 29, about 72% of whom have no criminal records, according to TRAC. After someone is detained, 'time is of the essence' for their attorneys to prevent them from being subject to expedited removal, or deportation without a hearing, said Jordan Weiner, legal director of the immigration removal defense program at San Francisco nonprofit La Raza Centro Legal. She also serves as an on-call attorney with the Rapid Response Network, providing emergency counsel to people who are detained. The Trump administration has fast-tracked deportations of people who cannot prove they've been in the U.S. for at least two years, allowing only a hearing before an immigration judge appointed by the Justice Department, with no right to a government-funded attorney. 'The administration is doing everything they can to get people arrested without a chance of release and get deported,' Weiner said. A Salvadoran man seeking asylum in the United States had been unable to sleep for days before his hearing in San Francisco immigration court on July 8, fearing he would be arrested and deported to El Salvador, which he had fled due to gang violence, according to two church friends – a mother and daughter – who accompanied him to his hearing. His worst fears materialized when he was arrested by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in a highly publicized incident caught on video in which protesters clung to the departing ICE van. 'It was horrible, horrible, horrible,' said the mother, who asked not to be named to avoid jeopardizing undocumented members of her congregation. Weiner, the on-call Rapid Response attorney that day, said that she heard about his arrest and rushed to the ICE office at 630 Sansome St., where detainees are held before being transported to a detention center. She declined to provide his name to the Chronicle because she has not been able to obtain his permission to do so. She needed his signature to appoint her as his legal counsel, without which she would have a hard time getting information or access to him. For two hours, she said she made repeated requests to the ICE officers to see him. But she said they seemed 'clueless' about whether he was still in the building. 'One of those officers said something to the effect of, 'There's still a group of males here and I don't know if he's in that group,'' she said. 'That terminology creeped me out. It's dehumanizing language.' She eventually left, frustrated by what she considered to be ICE denying him access to counsel. The Salvadoran man called his church friends the next day from Mesa Verde, where he'd been detained. The mother, herself a Salvadoran refugee who fled in the 1980s and has since naturalized, said 'he was just crying like a little boy. He couldn't even talk.' She and her daughter described the man, who they've known for a year, as a hardworking person, who did electrical, painting and cleaning work, but they're not sure they will ever see him again. Asylum seekers generally have the right to remain in the U.S. while their cases are pending but the government has argued it may detain them, which has been challenged in court to some success. Many of the 3,000 migrants seized by federal agents and National Guard troops in Los Angeles have been taken to the ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, also run by GEO. The Los Angeles Times reported that detainees have told lawmakers their food is moldy, they were given no clean clothes, underwear or towels for 10 days, and conditions were unsafe and unsanitary. At Mesa Verde, medical and mental health care are both substandard, the attorney general's report said. It said detainees are not tested for psychological problems and the staff fails to monitor those who are placed on suicide watch. One man said he suffered a broken nose and was given no treatment for four months, Bonta's report said, without providing details of his immigration case, which predates the current administration. Another who apparently had mental problems was supplied only with an inhaler and some over-the-counter pills. Detainees who should have received 30 days of medications under federal rules were given only a seven-day supply. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, chair of the California congressional delegation, said she has been asking federal officials about conditions at the detention facilities since 2021, during President Joe Biden's administration, and has received little response. 'As we begin to see more ICE presence and raids in communities, I am concerned about the conditions at detention facilities in California and across the country, particularly at for-profit centers,' said Lofgren, who is also a member of the House Immigration Subcommittee. 'I reiterate my belief that for-profit prisons are bad for the U.S. economy and safety.' The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment. CoreCivic, another private contractor that runs two ICE detention centers in Southern California and one in rural Sutter County, said its facilities comply with federal regulations. 'They adhere to all ICE standards and are monitored by ICE officials on a daily basis … to ensure an appropriate standard of living and care for all detainees,' Brian Todd, a company spokesperson, told the Chronicle. 'Our immigration facilities are also audited regularly and without notice several times a year, and we're routinely visited by elected officials, attorneys, families and volunteers.' Executives at both GEO Group and CoreCivic had celebrated Trump's presidential election win late last year as good for business. 'The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our country's history and the opportunities it will bring,' George Zoley, founder and executive chairman of the company's board, had said in an earnings call on Nov. 7 about Trump's victory. In 2023, 43% of GEO Group's more than $2.4 billion in revenue came from ICE contracts, according to its annual report. Under the contracts with ICE, the GEO Group is paid for housing detainees in 320 beds at Mesa Verde and 550 beds at the Golden State Annex in Mesa Verde, even though their populations were far lower in recent years – as of 2023, only 41 at Mesa Verde and 159 at the Golden State Annex, all of them male. Those populations have increased since pandemic restrictions were lifted, said Alex Mensing, spokesperson for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group. And he said detention will rise further under the budget bill approved by Congress and signed by Trump, which includes $71 billion for immigration enforcement. ICE now holds migrants in more than 190 facilities nationwide, including its own centers and others run by private contractors, and more are on the way, Mensing said. 'If they build it, they will fill it,' he said. Bonta's report said GEO has denied using force against detainees. But when some of them went on a hunger strike last year to protest conditions at Mesa Verde, the report said, four men were seized by guards, thrown to the ground, then taken in the middle of the night and flown to a detention center in El Paso. Detainees are patted down whenever they leave their cells, and some men have reported that guards have used the patdowns to stroke their genitals and nipples, the report said. It said GEO pays inmates $1 a day for a work program the company describes as "voluntary," while punishing those who do not take part. At the Golden State Annex, Bonta's report said, detainees 'were over-disciplined, including punishment for making complaints.' The report quoted three lawyers who said clients who had filed grievances were denied access to the commissary or were placed in maximum security. Another attorney told state investigators that clients who needed therapy were instead offered sleeping pills. And other detainees said they had been denied access to their lawyers, access that is required by federal law. Valerie Ibarra, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, which represents undocumented immigrants in removal proceedings, said Mesa Verde's scheduling system is inefficient and makes it difficult to schedule legal calls with people who are being detained. Lately, she said, the office staff has been told that the earliest available times for attorneys to meet detainees are two to three weeks out. 'That's an unacceptable amount of time to wait to talk to a lawyer, especially when the stakes are so high and the conditions of these detention centers are infamously inhumane,' said Ibarra. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit over attorney access during Trump's first administration and won a ruling in 2018 from U.S. District Judge Otis Wright of Los Angeles, who criticized federal agents for detaining hundreds of immigrants in prison even though they had not been convicted of any crimes. The morning after the Salvadoran man was arrested, Weiner said he called her through his two church friends, whom she had met at the ICE office. She told him to make sure he requested a credible fear interview, which is the first step in seeking asylum and the only way for an asylum-seeker fearing persecution to avoid expedited removal. A government officer would decide whether he had reasons to fear persecution after deportation and therefore was eligible to apply for U.S. asylum. Having attorney access while in detention is critical to navigate the confusing process of fast-track deportation, Weiner said. She feared he would not understand that having a pending asylum application would no longer be enough to protect him against deportation. Weiner also tried to request a credible fear interview on his behalf through U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. But she was first required to provide a signed form appointing her as his legal counsel, which she couldn't obtain that Tuesday. 'I think this is a clear example of how ICE obstructs access to counsel,' she said. Weiner said she tried to schedule an attorney-client video call with him, but the earliest date that staff at the Mesa Verde facility where he's being held would allow it was July 17, according to a copy of an email she shared with the Chronicle. 'He might be deported by then,' she said.