Bay Area Man Found Not Guilty in ICE Assault Case
A jury on Friday ruled not guilty in the federal criminal trial of a man charged with assaulting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in San Francisco last year.
Caleb Alexander Ranney, a resident of Pittsburg in the East Bay, was arrested on Aug. 8, 2025, during a protest at the city’s ICE field office at 630 Sansome St.
He was charged with assaulting a federal agent and destruction of federal property, both misdemeanors. Those charges carried a maximum of two years in prison.
Central to the weeklong trial was video evidence of the confrontation taken from multiple angles, shown numerous times in court.
It shows around nine to 10 protesters outside the field office garage as two vans are escorted out by around 20 federal agents, mainly with ICE and Federal Protective Services. After the vans depart, the agents return to the garage. Protesters are seen banging on the garage door as it closes, knocking it off its track, before an agent fires several pepper balls outside through the door. The protesters run across the street.
Moments later, multiple agents come back outside through another door. One officer picks up a backpack left by a protester, at which point Ranney runs back and pushes another nearby ICE officer. He and another protester who tried to intervene are then tackled and detained.
The prosecution’s charging document alleged that Ranney “forcibly assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated and interfered with” an ICE deportation officer, later identified in court as Officer Joe Love, and that he damaged a secure vehicle entrance on the Jackson Street side of the building.
In closing statements on Friday, the defense said that while the video shows Ranney hitting the garage door and putting hands on Love, agents had escalated the temperature of the situation.
“To a hammer, everything is a nail,” Assistant Federal Public Defender Angela Chuang said. “To an ICE agent, every protester is a violent threat.”
She said that once the vans were escorted out of the garage, the immigration officers’ duties were complete, and they had no reasonable cause to come back out and confront the remaining protesters, including Ranney.
Part of the definition of assaulting a federal agent is doing so while the agent is on official duties. The defense maintained that confronting protesters is not within ICE’s duties.
She said that Ranney only returned once an agent seized a protester’s backpack.
“Once the garage closed, that could have been the end of it,” Chuang said. “Something that wouldn’t even get a yellow card in a soccer game. … they’re trying to turn into a federal crime.”
Prior to the start of the trial, Ranney’s defense asked U.S. District Judge Thomas S. Hixson, who presided over the trial, to consider the actions of Federal Protective Service Inspector Stephen Glumaz, another officer on the scene.
Both parties agreed on the fact that Glumaz fired pepper ball rounds into the crowd shortly before the alleged assault in a way that violated policy. He was later decertified from using the equipment for his conduct in the protest and another on Aug. 20, 2025.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eli Cohen of the prosecution said that context was not relevant to the case. He reminded the jury to set aside their feelings about ICE and federal immigration enforcement.
“Focusing on ICE’s deportation practices is a distraction. Focusing on the government’s immigration practices is a distraction. What the agents did at a protest 12 days later, the conduct of other agents, is a distraction. The evidence proves the defendant’s guilt,” Cohen said.
“The government isn’t saying this is the most serious assault. He didn’t knock him over, but that doesn’t matter,” he said. “The defendant is charged with assaulting Officer Love. The evidence proves that beyond a reasonable doubt.”