OAKLAND CITY COUNCIL
Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick reiterated that she was not previously aware that a raid conducted by federal agents in West Oakland on Aug. 16 involved a potential deportation matter.
The raid in West Oakland by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents involved a warrant for human trafficking, but ultimately included the arrest of a person now at risk for deportation.
Community members and later Oakland officials criticized OPD’s involvement acting as traffic control during the operation and following a council resolution last summer prohibiting collaboration with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Under questioning, Kirkpatrick said she was not aware of the deportation component prior to the raid and asked federal agents to view the warrant. “I was told it was under seal,” said Kirkpatrick.
Nevertheless, Kirkpatrick acquiesced to the federal agent’s request. “I accepted it on its face,” said Kirkpatrick. “I’m suppose to be able to rely on another law enforcement officer giving me information.”
Some Oakland elected officials, however, were much harder on Kirkpatrick than others. Councilmember Desley Brooks, for example, excoriated Kirkpatrick’s handling of the raid.
To prove her point, Brooks played a video clip from a police town hall that included Kirkpatrick telling the audience there was not deportation involved with the August raid. When the council voted to “receive” the report on the raid, rather than “accept” it, Brooks murmured, “The report is not worth the paper it’s written on.”
Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan also added to Brooks’s dissatisfaction. “I think Oakland got played here and should know better than to fall for this, particularly given the widespread and coverage of similar lies with HSI around the country,” said Kaplan.
Later, with a bit of biting irony following the August raid, Kaplan noted that a recent list of cities published by the U.S. Department of Justice, ostensibly cities that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is “mad at,” said Kaplan, does not include Oakland.
The controversy over ICE in Oakland is not going away. Kaplan will unveil legislation at a committee meeting on Dec. 5 to strengthen the city’s existing resolution that prohibits involvement with ICE, or as she put it Tuesday night, not even to offer their agents a cup of coffee.
ebcitizen.com 
By MW:
In regard to whether or not in Oakland there is a lot of: one, human trafficking going on; and two, the use of low cost undocumented alien slave labor by unscrupulous employers.
Some years ago I had a co-worker whose wife owned and operated a janitorial service specializing in commercial accounts in buildings. While his wife worked in the business fulltime, my co-worker also spent considerable working in the business in addition to his fulltime job where he was my co-worker.
He told me an interesting story. He said in certain neighborhoods in Oakland you would see commercial buildings that at a quick glance appeared to be vacant, in other words that supposedly had no tenants; but that if you looked more closely, you would see a lot of young children playing nearby and in the alleys. etc.
He said those “vacant” buildings actually housed secret factories, and a lot of the employees working inside were mothers, and that the youngsters playing outside and nearby were the children of those mothers.
In fact, my wife used to buy very nice dresses in various stores in Oakland's Chinatown for ridiculously low prices, and such as for instance only about five dollars, and until I asked her not to do it anymore, since I did not want to support operations engaged in slave labor and/or human trafficking.
And I used to work in a certain large office building in San Francisco that pretended to be union. If the janitorial in that building had been handled in a legitimate manner, the building's janitorial contractor, and which pretended to be union, would have had to assign approx ten fulltime union janitors to that building.
However, that building used a skeleton union janitorial crew, and usually of only three or four janitors, during the Monday thru Friday day and afternoon shifts, and got most of the janitorial done by bringing in large crew of undocumented aliens on weekends and the midnight shift, and who would usually be fired without pay, and under threat of being turned into Immigration for deportation if they did not just quietly and quickly disappear.
NOTE: If you are an employer and want to drastically reduce your labor expenses by using methods similar to the above, you can put ninety-five percent of your savings in your pocket. However so as to drastically reduce the probability of ending up in prison, don't be totlly selfish, and therefore take five percent of your savings and give them to the local politicians in the form of under the table bribes and/or election campaign contributions, or otherwise the local demagogues might decide to “prove” they are “great humanitarians” by noisily and strenuously objecting to your sleaziness.
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Kirkpatrick was a poor choice for Oakland.
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So what is the next step? Refuse traffic control in connection with execution of any federal warrant unless the federal government commits not to deport anyone detained as a result of the warrant or discloses enough of the warrant to allow the city to assure itself that there is no possibility of a deportation either as a collateral matter or with respect the main target of the warrant. [BTW, who, if anyone, was deported as a result of this raid? Was that person a victim of human trafficking or a perpetrator?] Was ICE involved in the raid? Would the federal government stop enforcing anti-human trafficking laws in Oakland (and let it be a matter for OPD exclusively) as a result of the proposed measures, or would they just not tell Oakland they are coming. Understanding the desire not to become an auxiliary of ICE or to do harm to good and harmless people, one would also hope that the response to this is not a competition for 2017 Most Anti-ICE at whatever cost and no matter how small or purely symbolic the actual benefit.
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