Despite Trump threats, here’s the reason the Bay Area may not see mass deportations

President Donald Trump has threatened to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States without legal permission. But nearly a month since he took office, there seems to have been only limited, targeted enforcement activity in the Bay Area.

Though U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has plenty of manpower in California, Trump may face obstacles carrying out his proposed deportations in the Bay Area, experts said. Not only does the region have limited detention facilities, but a large proportion of immigration arrests nationwide are conducted with the assistance of local law enforcement — which California does not allow as a sanctuary state.

“ICE simply does not have the logistical capacity to pull off the mass deportations promised or even outlined in the various executive orders, directives and memos,” said Caitlin Patler, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Maria Romani, director of the Immigrants’ Rights program at the ACLU of Northern California, said ICE does not have “the funding, the personnel or the detention capacity to carry out the mass deportation that the administration has threatened to carry out.”

In the first four weeks of Trump’s second presidency, the Bay Area has seen limited immigration enforcement. Targeted ICE operations took place in San Jose on two days in late January, resulting in a handful of arrests, and in Concord in early February, though there were no immediate details on whether any arrests were made.

Over the last decade, between 70% and 75% of ICE arrests in the U.S. have been handoffs from local law enforcement, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. An analysis of ICE apprehensions data by Patler and others found that 27% of arrests nationally were of people living in the community arrested directly by ICE, while other arrests were done in collaboration with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies or other entities.

“That’s the only way that our mass apprehension apparatus can function at the level that it even currently does, let alone the promised expansion,” Patler said. “California is not going to stand in the way, but they’re not going to allow their law enforcement agency to do that work for ICE.”

California became a “sanctuary state” in 2017 during Trump’s first administration after passing legislation that bars local law enforcement from working with immigration officials in most cases. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, state and local officials have reiterated a commitment to California’s sanctuary state laws.

“Contrary to what the administration has been saying, there are actually very few non-citizens who have criminal convictions in the country, so the idea that there could be mass deportations of people convicted of crimes is pure nonsense,” said David Hausman, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. “That’s made up.”

Because of its sanctuary state status, Patler said, any immigration action in the Bay Area would have to be conducted completely by ICE or other federal agencies, adding that they have “plenty of strength” but it depends on “where they want to flex it.”

“ICE would have to dramatically change how it operates in order to make massive increases in the number of arrests,” Hausman said.

After immigration arrests are made, people are either taken to a detention center or released back into the community once removal proceedings have commenced. Hausman added that many people will be entitled to be released on bond while awaiting court proceedings, which have a backlog of years.

ICE’s San Francisco field office, which oversees Northern California, Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, runs two detention centers. Both centers are located in Central California: the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, which has 400 beds, and the Golden State Annex in McFarland, which has 700 beds, Romani said.

There are several other centers located in central and southern California overseen by other California ICE field offices or by private contractors.

Patler added that although there are “logistical hurdles” to transporting people to the Central California facilities, they have a “pretty well oiled machine.”

“The threat is real,” said Romani. “Once the Trump administration … has their infrastructure in place and ramps up enforcement, we are going to see more enforcement.”

In order to implement the level of enforcement threatened, ICE would need to have a “mass expansion of immigration detention in California and elsewhere,” Patler said.

ICE issued a request for information last year to seek a facility within a two-hour commute of the San Francisco ICE offices, according to forms the ACLU retrieved through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. ICE was seeking a facility with 850 to 950 beds for noncitizens, according to the forms.

Immigration advocates have expressed concern that the federal Dublin Women’s Prison, which was recently permanently closed, could be used as a detention center. The ACLU of Northern California is “concerned about that possibility,” Romani said, adding that the federal government could either transition the facility into an ICE detention center or sell it to a private contractor that could then operate it as a detention center under a federal contract.

A contract proposal to use CoreCivic’s California City Correctional Center in California City as a detention center was submitted as a response, according to documents retrieved by the ACLU. Other documents withheld in the ACLU’s FOIA request indicated that the GEO Group also submitted facilities for consideration for the San Francisco field office, though the specifics of their proposal were withheld.

“I don’t think those are empty threats when he says that we will see increased enforcement, despite there not being physical facilities closer to the San Francisco field office,” Romani said.

“Anytime a detention center opens, it’s not good for the community, it’s not good for immigrants,” she said. “It tends to mean more enforcement action.”

Already, the rhetoric from the federal government has created “so much fear,” Patler said.

“If that was the intended effect, whether stated or unstated, then that has succeeded,” she added. “That has succeeded massively – to create fear, anxiety, trauma.”