OAKLAND — City leaders were on high alert Thursday after a mass arrest by federal immigration authorities in East Oakland erased any doubt that the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to law enforcement could extend to one of the country’s most progressive cities.
At a news conference Thursday about Trump’s threats this week to deploy the National Guard to Oakland, officials cleared time for a local attorney to provide more details about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of at least six people on Tuesday.
Among those arrested is a minor with Down syndrome who has been separated from his family and was sent to the state of New York on Thursday morning, said the attorney, Nikolas De Bremaeker. None of the detainees have significant criminal histories, he added, a departure from how ICE operated during previous White House administrations.
The arrest followed Trump’s threat on Monday to deploy National Guard troops to major U.S. cities that struggle with crime, including Oakland — a warning that came as the president executed a federal takeover of the police department in Washington, D.C.
It remains unclear whether the president naming Oakland — along with Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles — was just another characteristically offhanded remark, or a more meaningful warning in light of the National Guard’s deployment to D.C.
No matter what, Oakland leaders are taking the threats seriously, and condemned the president’s actions as unconstitutional on Tuesday. Two city councilmembers and an NAACP official went as far as to accuse Trump of trying to distract the country from his much-scrutinized ties to the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“It is fearmongering, and not fact,” Mayor Barbara Lee said of Trump’s remarks, pointing to a citywide decline in violent crime, including homicides, robberies and carjacking.
The former longtime congresswoman, who was on the House of Representatives floor when a mob inspired by Trump stormed the capital on Jan. 6, 2021, said “no one knows this president’s playbook better than I do.”
“We’re talking about having a president who had Oakland’s name in his mouth about crime, who is a convicted felon,” said Councilmember Carroll Fife, in reference to Trump’s criminal convictions last year for falsified business records.
She and another councilmember, Janani Ramachandran, also alluded to allegations that Trump’s name appears in files linked to Epstein, a billionaire friend of Trump’s who died in a New York City jail cell while awaiting sex trafficking charges.
Retired Alameda County Judge Brenda Harbin-Forte, a member of the local NAACP chapter, joined the speakers to read aloud a statement from national organization’s president, Derrick Johnson.
It is unclear what the city can do to fend off a potential arrival of National Guard troops, with Lee saying only that “our legal team is analyzing the constitutionality of all of these threats.” Oakland Police Chief Floyd Mitchell was listed as a tentative participant in Thursday’s press conference but did not attend.
Trump’s comments on Monday coincided with the start of a three-day trial that comes after the state of California challenged the legality of the National Guard’s deployment in June to Los Angeles during protests of ICE raids.
“We asked the court to grant a permanent injunction to stop the administration from using the military for domestic law enforcement and maintaining a standing army in Southern California,” state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement Wednesday, after the trial had wrapped.
Oakland, meanwhile, has strained funding for nonprofits that work directly with local immigrants, including Centro Legal de la Raza — a primary resource for those facing detainment by ICE agents.
De Bremaeker, an attorney at Centro Legal in Oakland, said arrests have ramped up this year after Trump took office, with detainees often held in “deplorable conditions.” Unlike during the Biden administration, he said, “nearly everyone” arrested these days do not have criminal backgrounds. In recent months, immigrants showing up to status court hearings in San Francisco and Concord have been detained and deported.
The minor discussed at the press conference, a teenager, was detained Tuesday along with “five of his housemates and family members” at a home on 79th Avenue near Hillside Street, said De Bremaeker, who described the teen as breaking down in tears when he learned that members of his family had been transferred to a detention facility in Tacoma, Wash.
De Bremaeker said the teen was allowed to stay in a hotel overnight Tuesday, brought back to the ICE detention center in San Francisco on Wednesday and then transferred Thursday morning to New York.
The attorney described the holding cell where the teen was kept as “just a bare cement floor.”
“They are just given a piece of plastic to use as a blanket,” he said. “It’s inhumane and should not be happening anywhere in the world, let alone in the Bay Area.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.