SAN FRANCISCO, California — San Francisco's transportation agency is asking the federal government to 'immediately remove' U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles from a city-owned downtown parking garage, Mission Local reported on Monday, November 2, turning a weekend revelation about the garage into an open standoff between the city and federal immigration authorities. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) confirmed on Friday that ICE has assigned parking spaces inside the Golden Gateway Garage at 250 Clay Street, in the Financial District, a short walk from the ICE field office at 630 Sansome Street.

Source: Mission Local

'We are aware that the [General Services Administration] has assigned parking spaces to the Federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency in the SFMTA's Golden Gateway garage, as it is located on Clay Street in very close proximity to the ICE field office,' SFMTA communications director Parisa Safarzadeh told Mission Local on Friday. On Monday, the agency went further and asked the federal government to remove the vehicles immediately, according to Mission Local's follow-up reporting.

How ICE ended up parking in a city garage

The arrangement has three layers, none of which names ICE on the city's own paperwork. San Francisco contracts the private firm IMCO Parking to operate the garage. IMCO subcontracts a portion of the garage to the federal General Services Administration (GSA), which manages property for federal agencies — and the GSA in turn assigned spaces to ICE. SFMTA said it knew about the GSA subcontract when it was signed, but the contract does not say which federal agency the GSA would place there. The Golden Gateway is one of 12 city facilities in 'Garage Group B'; in 2022 the SFMTA Board of Directors awarded the contract to run that group to IMCO Parking, for up to nine years and capped at $180 million, according to the board's resolution.

What Mission Local saw inside

Mission Local visited the garage on Friday afternoon and observed a barricaded section filled with unmarked cars with federal government licence plates, including a row of white vans; no ICE officers or other federal officials were visible at the time. Activists who track ICE activity around the federal building at 630 Sansome Street say agents have worked out of the garage for at least a year. Mission Local also reported that video of an arrest outside the Concord Immigration Court in October 2025 shows a blue Nissan SUV used by ICE with the same licence plate as a vehicle parked inside the garage, and it recounted a July 2025 confrontation in which an ICE SUV drove through a crowd of protesters and a woman holding onto its hood was thrown onto the street. It remains unclear whether the SFMTA knew about ICE's use of the garage before Mission Local's inquiries on Friday.

The sanctuary-law question

Angela Chan, an assistant chief attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender's Office who helped write the city's sanctuary laws, said the arrangement may violate city and state sanctuary laws, which prohibit collaboration between local municipalities and federal immigration agencies. 'SFMTA is responsible for overseeing city-owned garages and ensuring they are not used to facilitate ICE operations, directly or through private contractors,' Chan said. That 'through private contractors' phrase is the legal heart of the dispute: the city never signed anything with ICE, but its own property, run by its own contractor, has been housing the agency's vehicles.

Why a parking garage matters

For San Francisco's immigrant communities — including the Bay Area's large Punjabi population, many of whom drive past 630 Sansome for immigration hearings and check-ins — the garage is not an abstract contract dispute. Vehicles staged a block from the field office are, in the activists' account, the logistics of the enforcement operation itself: the vans and unmarked cars that arrive at homes, workplaces and courthouses across the region. That is why the city's sanctuary ordinance, one of the oldest in the country, is written around exactly this question — whether city resources, and not just city officers, can be put at the service of federal immigration enforcement.

What happens next

The SFMTA says it is working with the City Attorney's Office on its contractual options and with IMCO Parking on compliance with local law, and it has now formally asked the federal government to remove the vehicles immediately. What the city has not yet answered — and what will decide the fight — is whether it can end the GSA subcontract arrangement before its term runs, or whether the federal government can keep parking in a city garage over the city's objection. Neither the GSA nor ICE had announced a response in the reporting available Monday night.