Protesters gathered at Fruitvale Plaza in Oakland, California, on Sunday, November 8, to speak out against a fresh round of immigration detentions in the East Bay, after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed that at least five people were detained in the East Bay on Thursday and a local rapid-response group reported four more people picked up in Oakland on Saturday.

Source: CBS Bay Area via KION

The Sunday gathering was organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation and drew residents to Fruitvale, a neighbourhood long described by its own organizers as the heart of Oakland's immigrant community. CBS Bay Area, which covered the protest, reported that ICE had confirmed the five Thursday detentions in the East Bay, while the Alameda County Immigration Legal and Education Partnership — known as ACILEP, the county's rapid-response network — reported the four Saturday pickups in Oakland. Taken together, the two counts mean at least nine people were detained in the area in three days.

“That's why we're here today,” protest organizer Aditi Varshneya told CBS Bay Area, “to mobilize in Fruitvale, the heart of the immigrant community here, to really let the will of the people be known.” Varshneya said, “There's been this ICE surge for the last several days.” Some attendees told the broadcaster they believed the stepped-up enforcement was retaliation for the results of Tuesday's elections — a belief stated by protesters at the scene, not a claim ICE or any federal agency has confirmed.

What the sheriff's office said on Sunday

The Alameda County Sheriff's Office issued its own statement on Sunday affirming its policy of not assisting ICE operations, while acknowledging that it, too, has seen increased immigration enforcement activity at its jail facility. “More recently, the Sheriff's Office has observed federal immigration enforcement take place outside of Santa Rita Jail,” the statement said. “We understand that maintaining contact with incarcerated loved ones is critically important and this is at the forefront as we determine next steps.”

The sheriff's office said it is looking into what options it has for securing the jail area. Santa Rita Jail, in Dublin, is Alameda County's main jail, and enforcement outside a jail's gates matters to every family — including the Punjabi and other immigrant families across Oakland, Hayward, Fremont and the wider East Bay — who travel there for visits and releases. CBS Bay Area noted that similar detentions were made outside Monterey County's jail facility in October as well.

The federal position, and the policy backdrop

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reaffirmed last week that immigration enforcement would not be diminished regardless of the election results, writing in a three-word post on X, two days after the election: “Deportations will continue.” CBS Bay Area said it reached out to ICE for comment on Sunday and had not yet received a response. The names of the people detained on Thursday and Saturday, and where they are being held, had not been released in Sunday's reporting.

The sheriff's non-cooperation position is not new. The Alameda County Sheriff's Office's General Order 1.24, revised on October 21, 2026, sets out a “Zero-Contact Policy” with immigration officials except when a criminal warrant has been signed by a judge, and states that a person's immigration status alone has no bearing on how its members carry out their duties. The order ties the policy to Alameda County's Welcoming County Resolution of 2016 and to California Government Code section 7284.6, the state law — part of the California Values Act framework — that limits how local agencies work with federal immigration enforcement.

Sunday's detentions also follow weeks of rising activity that local advocates have been counting in public. Reporting by Bay City News, summarized by the Bay Area Brief on October 29, put ICE detentions in Alameda County at at least eight people since October 16 — in Emeryville, Oakland, Hayward and Union City — with ACILEP co-director Angel Ibarra-Nuez telling the service that several of the arrests appeared to follow a pattern. ICE separately named six men it said it arrested around the Bay Area in that period, most of whom the agency said had criminal histories — an agency characterization that, like all such claims, applies to the individuals named and not to the people detained this weekend, about whom ICE has released no details.

What happens next

Protesters at Fruitvale emphasized that, in their view, the fight over ICE detentions would not end simply because votes had been counted. Mark Airgood, a member of the activist group By Any Means Necessary, told CBS Bay Area: “When will we abolish ICE? I can't give a date, but I do think the movement adopts that as a central plank of our movement, which is happening.” For now, the confirmed next steps are institutional, not rhetorical: the sheriff's office says it is determining its next steps on securing the area around Santa Rita Jail, ICE has yet to answer CBS Bay Area's Sunday request for comment on the weekend detentions, and ACILEP's count of Saturday's Oakland pickups remains the only public accounting of those four arrests. Any court or removal proceedings for the nine people detained since Thursday would play out in immigration court, where cases are heard separately from the criminal courts — and where, as of Sunday night, no case details for this group had been made public.