Apparently not. (A protester’s sign in San Francisco, July 15, 2025) Lea Suzuki/SF Chronicle via AP
This story was originally published by Mission Local, a nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco. You can donate to them here.
At least two people arrested by federal immigration officers last Thursday at immigration court in San Francisco have been flown to Hawaii, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
They are now being held in the Federal Detention Center Honolulu, a federal prison, according to ICE’s online detainee search tracker.
There are no ICE detention centers in Hawaii, so the federal government has placed immigrants in prisons. ICE in February signed an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Prisons—part of the Justice Department—to reserve space for ICE detainees, according to the Honolulu Civil Beat, which reported residents from out of state being transferred to Hawaii as early as June.
Immigration lawyers in Hawaii told the Civil Beat that they are concerned residents of other states are not getting effective counsel in Hawaii; even if they had a lawyer, it’s difficult to stay in touch thousands of miles away, they told the Civil Beat.
Mission Local saw both arrests last week. ICE swarmed both people immediately after they exited routine court hearings at immigration court, at 630 Sansome St. In both cases, an attorney with the Department of Homeland Security moved to dismiss their cases—a tactic the Trump administration is increasingly using to detain and fast-track asylum-seekers out of the country.
One of the arrestees was a man whose courtroom demeanor—he was mumbling to himself through the morning—led the immigration court judge to say he appeared to be mentally impaired. “It’s obvious to me that there are competency issues,” the judge, Patrick O’Brien, said at the time. ICE arrested the man moments later, anyway.
There are no ICE detention centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many people arrested in the Bay Area are placed in detention centers in the Central Valley or Southern California, though some people recently arrested in the Bay Area have since been flown to Arizona and Texas.