Supervisor Chyanne Chen arrived at Immigration Court at 630 Sansome St. early this morning to sit in on court proceedings and tour the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities there. Chen, who represents San Francisco’s District 11, is the third supervisor since late September to do this, following District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
Unlike her predecessors, Chen is also an immigrant.
It is important that San Francisco continues to be a Sanctuary City, Chen said. She called the federal government’s recent directives an “attack on the vitality of the city, the intelligence of the city and of America.”
Chen emphasized that she and her colleagues are committed to finding “meaningful and responsible” ways to further fund immigration services, despite the city’s current budget deficit.
It’s “heartbreaking,” Chen said, to see how immigrants are affected by recent ICE raids and arrests. Those impacted include families from the San Francisco Unified School District — one-third of SFUSD students are children of immigrants, she said.
At the door, security personnel informed Chen that Judge Patrick O’Brien had canceled his 8:30 a.m. docket.
Chen, accompanied by Milli Atkinson the Director of the Bar Association of San Francisco’s immigrant legal defense program, Lariza Dugan-Cuadra the Director of the non-profit CARECEN SF, and staff representing Supervisors Fielder and Myrna Melgar, entered the building to tour the ICE facility on the sixth floor, where immigrants are detained after ICE arrests them.
Although Mission Local accompanied Fielder and Dorsey on their visit to the sixth floor, this time, security blocked Mission Local from doing so. In fact, security informed the group, Mission Local was blocked from the entire building, until court proceedings began.
Later, Chen recounted her experience at the ICE facilities to Mission Local via a written statement.
Chen visited the call rooms. These rooms, split by a glass partition, are designed for attorneys to communicate with their clients through phones hung on the walls (A recent ACLU lawsuit states that these phones often do not work). Atkinson told Chen that sometimes lawyers are forced to wait hours before being allowed to speak with their clients. In those small rooms, Chen wrote, “It seems impossible for lawyers and clients to have sensitive conversations that maintain client-attorney confidentiality.”
Chen also described going beyond areas that Fielder and Dorsey saw. “People are held in an office space for up to 72 hours without food, water, a bed or any opportunity for rest.” The experience made her deeply emotional, Chen wrote.
Back outside of the Sansome St. immigration courthouse, security finally permitted Mission Local to enter the building and travel to the fourth floor at 10:30 a.m. for Judge Joseph Park’s very short docket of six immigrants. The eight benches sat virtually empty, a stark difference from last week’s proceedings, where attendees were squished into the benches shoulder-to-shoulder.
Only one of the six appeared for their hearing today: a young Colombian woman seeking asylum.
Immigration attorneys, from across the Bay Area, have reported that their clients fear attending their hearings after months of arrests by ICE that have flooded the news and social media.
“The ICE raids in the courthouses put people in fear,” Concord immigration attorney Wahida Noorzad told Mission Local. If they fail to appear, they get an “automatic deportation order,” and a $5,000 fine — but that’s if ICE can manage to catch up with them. Faced with these options, some asylum-seekers are taking their chances and choosing to go underground.
In the case of the one asylum-seeker who did show — a Colombian woman — Park rescheduled her hearing for early January to allow her time to find an attorney.
Then Park closed out the five remaining cases one-by-one. Immigrants from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Peru will now face deportation. “This is an order of absentia,” the judge said as he closed out each case, to a near-empty courtroom. “There is no appeal of this decision.”