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With at least 140 San Mateo County residents arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the last year — leaders behind the county’s rapid response to ICE offered insight into what happens if a county resident is detained.
Faith in Action Bay Area is a faith-based nonprofit that has been the county’s Swiss Army knife in navigating ICE: fielding urgent calls about suspected immigration enforcement; offering financial, emotional and legal support for those affected by ICE locally; and training and deploying volunteers who verify reports of ICE activity and accompany non-citizen community members at immigration appointments.
Faith in Action keeps track of arrest figures in the county, which it said peaked last fall, with 45 documented in September and October 2025. In November and December, arrests were 14 and 17, respectively. The count fell to zero in January and one in February, which the organization’s attorney partners attributed to injunctions from lawsuits, including one requiring the Department of Justice to improve the conditions of holding cells in San Francisco, Nani Friedman, a spokesperson with Faith in Action, said.
FIA’s count spans September 2025 to July 2026. In March, arrests were at 12 and rose again in April to 18, then dipped steadily in May to 11 and June to eight, the organization reported. Arrests shot back up to 17 in July, a pattern Faith in Action said it can’t explain.
According to Faith in Action, the county has yet to see an immigration raid. The organization said ICE has focused its arrests on people at their homes and at immigration check-ins, including people who have overstayed their visas, missed a court appointment or have otherwise allegedly violated immigration laws. In recent months, the organization has documented arrests at airports involving people traveling who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.
Then what?
When someone in the Bay Area is detained by immigration enforcement, they are typically taken to the ICE processing center at 630 Sansome St. in San Francisco, according to Jenny Horne, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, which oversees Faith in Action’s immigration legal work.
If the detainee’s family calls the San Mateo County rapid response hotline at (203) 666-4472 or NO-MIGRA before 2:30 p.m., Faith in Action said it can send attorneys to meet with the detainee at the processing center the same day to help them understand their rights.
It’s helpful, Horne said, for people who may be at risk of detention to make sure a trusted family or friend knows their country of origin and “alien number” or “A-number,” the number the Department of Homeland Security assigns to an immigrant. This number makes it easier to locate a person in ICE’s online detainee locator system, which shows whether and where someone is being held in immigration custody, plus immigration court dates.
Rapid response attorneys will look at the case and see if any immediate remedies can be filed, such as a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which asks the court to release a person from confinement when their constitutional rights have been violated, according to Horne. Habeas corpus filings have been “most successful” in freeing detainees, she said, sometimes as quickly as the next day.
In other cases, detainees can pay a bond for quick release, Horne added, though the Trump administration has worked to limit this option, so obtaining a bond order can be difficult.
Sometimes, however, Faith in Action emergency response attorneys determine there are no quick remedies. In those cases, attorneys will call a family member to provide them with the legal assessment and offer a list of reputable private immigration attorneys — because the family would have to hire somebody to handle the next steps, Horne stated.
The ICE office on Sansome Street doesn’t have the resources to hold people in a “safe, humane way,” Horne said, so agents try to transfer detainees to a different facility within a few hours. Most of the detainees with whom she has spoken were sent to the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center and the California City Detention Facility, both in Southern California.
Inside detention
The California City Detention Facility is the subject of a class action lawsuit filed in November 2025 by seven detainees. The facility, based in the Mojave Desert, was a previously shuttered state prison repurposed for ICE. The complaint describes conditions there as “dire” and “decrepit.”
“Sewage bubbles up from the shower drains, and insects crawl up and down the walls of the cells,” the complaint states. “People are locked in concrete cells the size of a parking space for hours on end, and officers threaten them with violence and solitary confinement.”
“Food is paltry and people go hungry,” the complaint continues. “Those who cannot afford to buy sweatshirts from the exorbitantly priced commissary suffer in the cold, some wearing socks on their arms as makeshift sleeves.”
The lawsuit alleges detainees at the California City facility have faced inadequate medical care, poor sanitation, cold conditions and other unsafe treatment. The federal government has disputed many of those claims, including allegations involving medical care, attorney access, clothing and recreation.
The case remains pending, but in February a judge issued a preliminary injunction requiring several changes at the facility, including independent monitoring, temperature-appropriate clothing and at least one hour of outdoor recreation per day.
A deportation begins when the Department of Homeland Security files a Notice to Appear with immigration court, which is a document signifying that the U.S. government is initiating removal proceedings against a person, the U.S. Department of Justice’s website states.
From there, an immigration judge decides whether an immigrant is removable based on evidence submitted by the immigrant or DHS. If the judge decides so, the immigrant can either accept the order or apply for relief from removal.
The DHS may grant asylum if an immigrant can demonstrate fear of persecution or torture if returned to their country of origin, for example, according to the Department of Justice’s website.
Horne said that for some people, “the conditions are so bad that they just give up” and forgo due process in agreeing to an expedited deportation.
Close to home
On Tuesday, the County Board of Supervisors will consider a resolution, proposed by supervisors Noelia Corzo and Ray Mueller, that would, at minimum, regulate the operation of detention facilities in unincorporated San Mateo County, including North Fair Oaks.
A new ICE facility could open about 50 miles away in Gilroy, though the federal government agreed to pause construction until Sept. 9 following a recent court injunction.
When asked about the prospect of a closer facility, Horne said that any increase in the government’s capacity to hold people “who have generally just fled horrific conditions in their country” and have not committed crimes that suggest they are dangerous to the community is “abhorrent.”
However, she acknowledged that the farther a detained person is from their family and attorney, “the harder it is.” She said many family members of detainees are afraid to visit detention centers because of their own immigration status, or even if they are citizens, “people are pretty scared” anyway.
Horne encourages people to “plan for the worst and hope for the best” in crafting a “family preparedness plan,” especially by determining who could care for children and where important documents are kept, should ICE arrest a caregiver.
“There are people who are out there to help,” Horne said, “so call for help as rapidly as you can.”
Those interested in volunteering with Faith in Action can join its hundreds of verifiers who visit sites rumored to have an ICE presence and/or accompany immigrants who want extra reinforcement and support at ICE check-ins and in court in San Francisco.
Faith in Action’s other volunteer efforts include distributing posters and yellow/orange/red cards that can help immigrants assert their rights. The organization also encourages help to spread awareness of verified ICE activity by reposting its @fiabayarea Instagram and “Faith in Action Bay Area” Facebook posts.
