A pissed-off Thomas Homan, mass deportation architect and acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is blaming Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for the fact that his agents weren’t able to arrest more immigrants in a three-day sweep that targeted her city and other areas of Northern California. The day before they began, Schaaf warned immigrant residents that “credible sources” indicated sweeps were likely, and to take precautions to know their rights. “She and Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick discussed the reports before Schaaf concluded that the information was solid enough to warrant going public,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. They were right, and more than 150 were eventually arrested:
As Schaaf decided whether to warn the community Saturday, she said she was thinking of the case of Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, a 46-year-old mother of four and nurse at an Oakland hospital, who, along with her husband, was deported to Mexico after more than 20 years in the United States. Neither she nor her husband had criminal records, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Neither did roughly half of the suspected undocumented immigrants rounded up in ICE’s latest North California operation — which, Schaaf said, is what she had feared.
“Maria Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband are an example of a couple that, under the previous administration, were considered low-priority for deportation,” Schaaf said. “And under this administration they were ripped away from their family. I was absolutely thinking of them when I made the decision to share the [ICE enforcement] information. I think it’s my responsibility as a person in power and privilege to share the information I have access to, to make sure people know what their rights are.”
These are the basic rights afforded anyone here, no matter their legal status. Homan doesn’t care. In fact, he’s said he’d “never back down” from his statement that immigrants with no criminal record should be living in perpetual fear, pledging to not only escalate enforcement in California because of the state’s numerous pro-immigrant policies, but promising that those raids would inevitably result in “collateral arrests,” a crass term describing when non-targets are swept up in targeted raids because they happened to be there at the time. Those were the arrests Schaff was trying to prevent, and considering ICE’s record, she likely did prevent many.
“Schaaf is unapologetic,” reports The Washington Post, with the mayor tweeting that she “[does] not regret sharing this information. It is Oakland’s legal right to be a sanctuary city and we have not broken any laws. We believe our community is safer when families stay together.” And, so-called “sanctuary city” policies follow the law, according to American Immigration Lawyer’s Association president David Leopold, and actually make localities safer because immigrant residents become less afraid of the police:
In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, she explained that her decision to tip off immigrants stemmed from a deep disagreement with immigration enforcement under the Trump administration and a resistance to the administration’s enforcement efforts.
She had already made her defiance clear last month when she told reporters that she was willing to go to jail to defend Oakland’s “sanctuary city” policy of protecting immigrants who are in the country illegally and not cooperating with federal authorities to deport them. She said Tuesday that she was responding to a suggestion from Homan in January that the Justice Department should begin criminally charging California politicians who supported sanctuary jurisdictions. Politicians like her, she said.
Asked by The Post whether she considered herself part of “the resistance” movement — the unofficial title for left-leaning Americans who do not support the Trump administration — she responded with a resounding yes.
“I consider myself a law-abiding citizen,” she said. “I consider myself a believer in an American democracy that moves towards a more just society. And I definitely consider myself part of the resistance.” An infuriated Homan: “I’ll say this to the mayor and every other politician that wants to vilify the men and women of ICE: We’re not going away, we’re going to keep enforcing the law.”