Less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, US immigration officers have begun harassment campaigns against migrants and those who support them: yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center in San Francisco’s Mission District, looking for “an individual for arrest and possible deportation.”
They left empty handed, saying they’d raided the wrong building.
The Good Samaritan complex includes a pre-school, adult English-language classes, and a health clinic. The raid, which included officers with drawn batons and a helicopter, was staged at a time when there were 30 toddlers and their preschool teachers and 20 families attending English as a Second Language Class.
President Trump on Wednesday, as part of his executive order vowing punishments for Sanctuary Cities like San Francisco, promised to publish a weekly lists of crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants in these cities. It is unclear whether local ICE agents already had some directive to detain one such alleged criminal. (Under the wording of the executive order, as CNN points out, undocumented people could be deported simply for being charged with a crime, even if they have not been convicted.)
The Ex spoke to former Mission District Supervisor David Campos who said he could only recall a “couple of cases” in which ICE went looking someone in the neighborhood for deportation, and no raids that occurred under his tenure as supervisor.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Is this a change in policy?’” Campos told the paper. “Trump just declared war on immigrants. This is very unusual.”
ICE Agents Descend On Mission’s Good Samaritan Center
[Jay Barmann/SFist]