San Francisco Condemns Immigration and Customs Enforcement Actions at SFO Airport

San Francisco supervisors this week uniformly decried local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in March, when the agency forcibly detained a woman at San Francisco International Airport.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted a resolution condemning the incident “and any further enforcement” in San Francisco.

The vote comes amid a widespread immigration crackdown nationwide and simmering tensions over the city’s sanctuary policies, which prevent local law enforcement from assisting in federal immigration enforcement.

“When there are public incidents that might alter public perception, it is important for the board and us as a city to clarify and double down on our intent… to ensure that residents, immigrants and refugees around San Francisco know that we are a sanctuary city,” Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, a sponsor of the resolution, said at a recent public meeting.

On the evening of March 22, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was traveling from SFO to Miami with her young daughter. Video footage from bystanders shows ICE agents in plain clothes aggressively handcuffing Lopez-Jimenez, who lived in Contra Costa County with her child and was born in Guatemala.

The video shows the mother on the ground crying before agents force her into a wheelchair. Within two days after the arrest, Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were deported to Guatemala.

The Department of Homeland Security said that the mother and daughter had received a final order of removal from an immigration judge in 2019.

“While being escorted to the international terminal for processing, Lopez-Jimenez attempted to flee and resisted law enforcement officers. ICE is working as quickly as possible to repatriate the family unit to their home country of Guatemala,” the agency said in a post on social media shortly after the incident.

The new resolution urges Congress to fully fund the Transportation and Security Agency (TSA) and withhold funding to ICE. Around the country, TSA agents went without pay during a partial government shutdown and the Trump Administration responded by sending ICE agents to airports to conduct security.

SFO works with a private contractor for security screening rather than government-paid TSA agents, so ICE agents did not replace security officials there. But that security structure does not prevent ICE from being at the airport and supervisors cannot bar them.

Government officials across the Bay Area have raised safety and privacy concerns since the March 22 arrest at SFO, which reporting from the New York Times revealed was prompted after TSA tipped off ICE about Lopez-Jimenez’s travel plans.

The arrest also sparked criticism of San Francisco police, who are shown in the video in significant numbers blocking bystanders from interfering with ICE agents.

“Officers were present solely in a public safety capacity, and their positioning on scene was for crowd management and deescalation only,” SFPD Chief Derrick Lew said in a letter to Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who chairs the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee. “To be clear, there was no planning or coordination with federal agencies.”

The resolution adopted on Tuesday was an amended version of an original proposal, which previously stated that SFPD “formed a barrier around the ICE agents, without requesting to see proper documentation.”

After pushback from law enforcement officials who described that framing as a mischaracterization, supervisors on the public safety committee pushed forward the amended version, which changed the language to say that officers “responded to a 911 call for service, made contact with the involved parties and confirmed the individuals were ICE agents.”

Dorsey, who put forward the amendments, urged his colleagues on the board to be cautious with the language in the resolution.

“We still have a legal obligation to do the work that police departments have to do. That doesn’t mean that we are facilitating or doing the federal government’s job,” he said at a recent Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting. “So we have to walk a fine line on this.”

Last year, San Francisco avoided an immigration enforcement crackdown.

President Donald Trump planned to send National Guard troops to the Bay Area, but later pivoted after saying he had conversations with tech billionaires Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (who walked back his previous support for the deployment) and Mayor Daniel Lurie. Still, ICE has continued to make arrests in the city and broader Bay Area.

Protests against ICE actions in San Francisco have taken place alongside increased enforcement. Multiple current and former supervisors were arrested at SFO during a May Day rally where demonstrators holding signs, some reading “support workers not ICE,” blocked off a roadway.

Mahmood said at a later May Day rally that he appreciated seeing his colleagues in leadership positions supporting airport employees and other protestors demanding protections for workers and immigrants.

“You can’t divorce workers’ rights, inequality, immigration and the federal government. They’re all intertwined,” Mahmood said. “You can’t have justice on one issue without justice on another.”