Teen Arrested in ICE Raid at an Oakland Home Detained Out of State, Attorney Says

Updated 1:40 p.m. Thursday

A teenager and a 21-year-old with a developmental disability arrested by immigration officials in Oakland this week have been sent to detention centers outside of the state, according to an Alameda County immigration nonprofit.

The two young people, who are now being held in New York and Washington, were among six detained after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided an East Oakland home on Tuesday, according to Abby Sullivan Engen, the immigration director at Centro Legal de La Raza in Oakland.

“We understand that an individual or a group of people was being investigated in some way, but … all of these other people got swept up by ICE. They, in their discretion, decided to arrest not only law-abiding adults, [but] a 17-year-old child and an adult with Down syndrome,” she said.

On Thursday morning, Centro Legal learned that the minor had been transferred to New York, where he is presumably being held at a youth detention center operated by the Department of Health and Human Services. The 21-year-old with Down syndrome was taken to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. At least some of the other adults were also transferred to Washington, though Engen said Centro Legal does not know all of their statuses.

The six people, some of whom advocates believe are related, were detained at their home near 79th Street and Hillside Road in East Oakland.

Shortly after the raid, the county’s rapid response hotline received a call from a detained individual’s family member.

While Engen said she hadn’t seen any proof of a warrant to search the house, she said that in most instances where ICE detains people at private residences, it happens when someone inside allows ICE access. Although people have the right not to open their doors, it often feels like they cannot in the moment, she said.

After the arrests, all of the individuals were first taken to ICE’s field office in San Francisco.

At a press conference Thursday, Nikolas De Bremaeker, one of Centro Legal’s attorneys who has been in communication with the detained individuals, said the minor, a 17-year-old boy, was forced to remain in a cement-floored holding cell for hours with just a piece of plastic to use as a blanket.

“He was terrified. He was in tears,” De Bremaeker said. “When I had to explain that his family members had been transferred, he burrowed down in tears, just feeling left behind.”

In the evening, he was taken to sleep at a hotel before being returned to custody at the office on Wednesday morning. While it is illegal under federal law for ICE to detain a minor for more than 24 hours in facilities that don’t meet specific standards in most cases, Engen said a hotel stay does not constitute release.

“He wasn’t released to a hotel where he had freedom of movement,” she said. “He was brought to a hotel where he was then being guarded by ICE overnight.”

Engen added that the others were forced to stay in the immigration office overnight, which isn’t set up to house people. ICE’s policy says detainees should not be kept in holding facilities for more than 12 hours, “absent exceptional circumstances.”

“We’ve heard reports of people being held there overnight, sleeping on the floor with no mattress, no blankets, inadequate food, inadequate water,” she said. “We haven’t been able to get detailed reports of the conditions of these specific people, [but] with many others in similar circumstances, we’ve gotten confirmation that they’re held in very inhumane conditions.”

One of Centro Legal’s attorneys, Nikolas De Bremaeker, has been advocating for the minor and the young adult with Down syndrome to be released, but was given very little contact with the detainees before their transfers out of state on Thursday, Engen told KQED.

“They operate in the shadows. They do everything possible to prevent attorneys from having access to their clients,” she said, adding that the young people have also been prohibited from communicating with their families. “Other than very, very minimal contact last night, [both] have been prohibited from having any contact with family members, which is blatantly illegal given their inability to — the minor being underage and the adult being disabled — to consent to things, sign documents themselves.”

ICE did not respond to KQED’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Engen said the incident should be a reminder that people have the right to decline ICE officials’ entrance to their homes and can revoke permission at any time.

“This wasn’t an instance of ICE roaming the streets or roaming a neighborhood looking for people; it’s just an example to highlight the importance of knowing what your rights are,” she said. “Once they are allowed into your home, [ICE] can pick up anybody they see, and that appears to be exactly what happened here.”

KQED’s Alex Hall contributed to this report.