Three U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handcuffed a man on 6th Street in SoMa Monday morning after a confrontation captured by a home security camera, according to The San Francisco Standard. The footage shows a plainclothes agent drawing a gun while the man appears unarmed. In the video, the man, dressed in a navy-blue suit, runs across the street toward the camera as agents pursue him. He tells them he is on his way to work, does not know who they are and says they are violating his rights as a U.S. citizen.
Juan Carlos, who lives on the block, told The San Francisco Standard that he looked outside around 8:45 a.m. after hearing yelling and saw two ICE officers catch up with the man near his building. Carlos said he warned the agents they were being recorded and feared the man might be killed. He said the plainclothes officer pressed a gun against his apartment window, and agents slammed the man against it hard enough to shake the glass before pushing him to the ground. Carlos said he had poured bleach on that spot on the sidewalk about 10 minutes earlier, as he does twice a day. The agents eventually led the handcuffed man north on 6th Street; Carlos said he did not know what happened afterward or whether the man was put in a car.
A Neighborhood Witness Describes the Scene
Carlos said parents often walk their children to Bessie Carmichael Elementary School on his block around that time of morning. Bessie Carmichael Elementary School is in South of Market. Carlos criticized what he described as an untrained person running with a gun while children were present nearby. He later posted a still image and description of the encounter on Reddit, a post that drew hundreds of upvotes and comments condemning ICE, per the same account from the Standard.
What school guidance says
San Francisco Unified School District advises people who see someone believed to be an immigration officer in a school neighborhood to contact the SF Rapid Response Network hotline. The district also says staff will keep students in class until an area is cleared and safe if there is a safety issue or possible disruption; its guidance does not indicate that school staff were involved in this street encounter. That guidance describes district response procedures, not federal enforcement rules. It does not explain how those rules have changed or establish that a school’s proximity alone prohibits an operation on a public street.
Anthony Proctor, who watched from his truck at the Chevron station at 6th and Harrison streets, said he was troubled by the agents surrounding the man. “I thought they were going to shoot him,” Proctor said. A small crowd gathered, and pedestrians took out their phones to record the encounter, according to the Standard.
No Comment From Federal Agencies
The Department of Homeland Security had no comment when reached by the Standard, and the San Francisco Rapid Response Network did not respond to a request for comment. The network otherwise operates a 24-hour hotline, 415-200-1548, and can activate attorneys when community members are detained by ICE, according to SFILEN.
The interaction lasted about six minutes from the moment agents cornered the man to when they led him away in handcuffs, the Standard's reporting indicates. The entire confrontation took place on a street where San Francisco police are barred from assisting such operations: under the city's Sanctuary City Ordinance, codified in Administrative Code Chapters 12H and 12I, municipal employees and local police cannot use city funds or resources to help ICE enforce civil immigration law, according to the City and County of San Francisco. California's SB 54, the Values Act, similarly bars state and local officers from arresting people for civil immigration violations or sharing non-public personal data with federal agents, per the ACLU of Southern California.
Firearms Drawn Under Federal Scrutiny
Firearms Drawn Under Federal Scrutiny ICE's own use-of-force rules, Directive 19009.3, state that the use and level of force must be objectively reasonable given the totality of circumstances and that no safe, feasible alternative exists, according to ICE. Questions about how that standard is applied and documented have intensified nationally: a Government Accountability Office report released this month found ICE rejected recommendations to adopt technology that automatically activates body-worn cameras whenever agents draw their weapons, as reported by Axios.
The SoMa confrontation also follows a similar episode in New York City, where plainclothes ICE officers drew firearms during a street stop that ended with an officer shooting a driver in the neck, prompting a federal judge to block the man's deportation while force policies were examined, according to PBS. Street-level arrests like the one on 6th Street represent a smaller but highly visible slice of enforcement activity in the region; an analysis of Bay Area ICE arrests over a nine-month period found roughly 19% occurred in public community settings like streets, while more than half happened during indoor routine check-in appointments, per Mission Local's review.
