Correction: An earlier version of this article neglected to attribute each quote as part of the original SF Examiner article referenced in the first sentence. Attributions have since been added.
Agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement searched a Mission District apartment looking for a suspect Thursday morning, according to an article by the SF Examiner
The agents left the area after being unable to locate a convicted sex offender sought by authorities for deportation.
Before leaving empty handed, the ICE agents mistakenly stopped by the next-door Good Samaritan Family Resource Center preschool while toddlers played nearby.
An ICE spokesperson, Virginia Kice, said the agents were prompted by informative leads to the Center after the agents went to the sex offender’s last known address and couldn’t find him.
These “routine enforcement activities,” as Kice reported to the SF Examiner, came the day after President Trump signed two executive orders that called for 10,000 new ICE agents to begin ramping up deportations across the country.
“Trump just declared war on immigrants. This is very unusual,” said former District 9 Supervisor David Campos in the SF Examiner article. Campos could not recall a similar action during his term as supervisor, which ended in November. President Trump’s staff has also announced that he will potentially be stripping sanctuary cities of federal funding, putting San Francisco’s financial state in jeopardy.
The current District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen reassured the public and made clear there was no breach in the sanctuary city’s safety.
“We don’t want people to be unnecessarily afraid,” Ronen said, according to the SF Examiner. “There has not been a raid.”
However, the timing of the search is hard to ignore. Though the agents did not technically conduct an official raid within San Francisco, this action challenges the status quo.