Bay Area Organizer Gets Extended Reprieve From ICE Detention

Updated 11:23 a.m. Friday

A San Francisco judge ruled Thursday that ICE cannot redetain a man without the approval of a neutral third party, keeping Bay Area community organizer Guillermo Medina Reyes out of custody until his case can be heard in front of a judge.

U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin granted a preliminary injunction barring  Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from detaining Reyes, a San José tattoo artist who has lived in the U.S. since he was 6 years old, until a judge can decide on the agency’s argument that he is a flight risk or danger to the community.

That came after a Tuesday order extending his temporary reprieve on the day it was set to expire.

“ICE is sort of saying that they have complete unilateral authority to detain anyone and that it doesn’t matter who the person is, how deserving the person is,” said Pete Weiss, co-director of Pangea Legal Services, which is representing him. “We are asking the court to basically say that [ICE] cannot detain him until he actually has a court hearing where somebody besides ICE should be making this decision.”

Advocates with the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and other local groups rallied outside of the federal courthouse and packed the courtroom for Medina Reyes’ preliminary injunction hearing amid escalating clashes between ICE and protesters in San Francisco. Last Tuesday, in one of the most violent altercations to date, about a dozen people outside the city’s immigration court faced off with agents as they tried to detain a man following a hearing.

Protesters attempted to barricade the agents inside and block their path to a waiting van. They continued to stand in their way as they put the handcuffed man into the vehicle and began to drive away. Video footage captured by journalists and protesters showed people banging on the sides of the van and being shoved in the street by agents.

One protester, who dove onto the hood of the unmarked black van, clung on for nearly half a block before falling from the vehicle into an intersection.

Outside the Montgomery Street court this week, a much larger group gathered, prepared to intervene in the event of ICE action.

Weiss said Medina Reyes is one of many immigrants who have been targeted in recent months amid ramped-up ICE enforcement at Bay Area immigration courts and regional office check-in appointments. Since May, officials have begun arresting people following mandatory asylum case hearings — a practice immigration attorneys previously called unprecedented.

Asylum seekers who don’t show up to these court dates risk automatically losing their cases and being deported in absentia, attorneys told KQED at the time. People who don’t appear at check-in appointments would likely be detained, according to Weiss.

Medina Reyes, 31, has been arguing for “withholding of removal” — a protection from deportation that is similar to asylum — for more than two years.

He came to San José with his mother as a child and lived in Santa Clara County until he was convicted of attempted murder as a teen. Medina Reyes spent more than a decade in prison,  during which time he focused on rehabilitation and committed to advocating for other immigrants and incarcerated people, Weiss said.

When he was released on parole in 2021, Medina Reyes was transferred to ICE custody.

“ICE didn’t really care about any of that,” Weiss said. “They basically punished him all over again, and said basically, ‘Okay, now it’s our turn.’”

After opening a case for withholding of deportation, Medina Reyes was released from detention by an immigration judge in 2023.

Weiss said the legal team hasn’t been given an explicit reason for ICE’s renewed interest in detaining Medina Reyes this spring, though he was arrested and charged with vandalism in May following a mental health incident.

“An immigration judge already has found that he’s not dangerous and that he is not a flight risk,” he said. The attorneys are arguing “that it would be illegal to re-detain him without another judge reviewing that determination.”

During the hearing, U.S. Department of Justice attorney Pam Johann argued that Media Reyes’ re-detainment would be justified because of his May arrest, which she said changed the circumstances of his release and violated its terms. She said that both when Medina Reyes was convicted of attempted murder as a teen and when he was arrested in May, he had been in possession of a knife.

But Lin asked Johann to explain why ICE should have the authority to decide that circumstances had changed — likening the agency’s position to a parole officer who can send a parolee back to jail without a hearing.

The terms of supervision that Johann said Medina Reyes violated come from ICE, not the immigration court that granted his release.

At Medina Reyes’ preliminary injunction hearing, Lin set a two-week deadline for him and the government’s attorneys to submit a timeline to hear the merits of his withholding of removal case, accelerating a final decision on whether he will gain legal status.

Medina Reyes said after the hearing that he felt relief, but that his case is not over.

“It was a mission to build all of this support. It was a bigger mission even … just to get out of that place,” he told reporters. “Some people do spend two years, three years [in detention], and they still get deported. I still may get deported.

“I would hope that everybody keeps on fighting and pushing. It’s not just for me, but it’s for the people that are going to come, generation after generation, because if we don’t put a stop to it now, it’s going to get worse,” he said.

In June, protesters shut the court down early after more than 100 rallied outside the downtown building to oppose two arrests made using the novel tactic. Two weeks later, ICE’s office in San Francisco similarly closed early after a protest broke out as agents transferred two people who had been detained that morning in Concord that morning into holding cells, Mission Local reported.

At least 29 people have been detained at San Francisco’s immigration courthouse and ICE office since May, according to Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association.

Weiss said that so far in 2025, Rapid Response Networks in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have recorded at least 28 and 45 detentions, respectively.