ICE increase repeats California police database failure

By George Galvis, especially for CalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Guest Comment written by

A government agency compiles a list of names. The criteria to be on the list: your address, your skin color, who you were seen talking to. No sentence required. Then you, your family and your children are watched. Your home is entered and searched without proper warrants.

This sounds like Minneapolis in 2026, but I’m actually describing Oakland in 2010 within a legal instrument called gang ban. We are now seeing this playbook adopted across the country and the consequences are deadly.

The gang injunction used in Oakland was a civil restraining order imposed on entire groups of people without criminal convictions. It was deployed on my block, against people I knew. I watched my community suffer the consequences for years and I helped foundation organization to fight him. We sued and beat him in Oaklandbut to my dismay, we are now seeing this oppressive and deeply flawed tactic replicated across the country.

The justification then, as now, was public safety. The city attorney then named 40 men with suspected gang ties in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood in the court order, imposing curfews, banning association and criminalizing their presence in their own neighborhoods.

But the list is not built on evidence of criminal activity. It was built on a database called CalGangwhich at its peak contains more than 200,000 names predominantly black and Hispanic.

Likewise, ICE exceeds its mission and sweeping up American citizensNative Americans and Legal Status Workers in Minneapolis, CalGang sweep people who have no business being on some list.

A state audit identified 42 youths whose names were added to the list when they were infants; 28 of them were listed as “confessed gang members.”

three Los Angeles police officers were charged with crimes to fabricate records. When ACLU attorneys forced Los Angeles to review the 9,000 names on its gang ban list, the city removed more than 7,000, admitting there was no evidence they were active gang members.

Skin color and zip code

Thousands of people had their rights restricted based on skin color and zip code alone.

People like Abel Manzo, a 25-year-old licensed barber who co-owns a shop in Fruitvale. He was booked after a probation officer spotted him wearing a red T-shirt. He was later arrested for probation violation after briefly attending the funeral of a friend’s son. he testify in court that he had no gang affiliations. The ban meant he could not visit his family at night. His business suffered. His life was turned upside down by an assignment he had no meaningful way to challenge.

The gang bans failed by all criteria. Of the 40 defendants in Fruitvale alone eight were arrested in the designated area and none for violating the ban. The city millions spent in the name of public safety, but violent crime actually increased in north Oakland after the order went into effect.

The orders are not aimed at the right people because they were never meant to be. They targeted a race of people and called it law enforcement.

The same pattern played out in Minneapolis. In December 2025, Operation Metro Surge was deployed around 3,000 armed federal agents to the Twin Cities, ostensibly to address fraud in government programs featuring members of the Somali-American community. Of the thousands arrested, only 23 were Somaliand no one is connected to the fraud cases.

Agents surrounded the schools and buses followed. A leaked memo authorized federal agents to enter homes with administrative warrants — not the typical court orders signed by a judge as required by law. The people detained included restaurant workers, hotel employees, Target cashiers, including some Native Americans and US citizens.

The common thread was not a criminal record. It was the color of the skin.

Two American citizens protesting the violence are dead. Renee Goodmother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent after dropping her son off at school. Alex Prettya VA hospital nurse, was killed while taking pictures of agents during a protest.

Agents also detained at least nine children, including a A 5-year-old child was taken by his father in their driveway, still carrying his Spider-Man backpack.

Built on racial profiling

Both discrimination systems were directly related. From 2006 to 2016 ICE had direct access to CalGangusing it in immigration procedures. A state audit later found it full of errors and fabrications.

A database built on racial profiling in California it became the basis for a deadly immigration enforcement apparatus.

Border King Tom Homan recently announced that Operation Metro Surge was ending and agents withdraw from Minnesota. But he made it clear that the staff would be “deputed elsewhere”. The occupation does not end; it moves.

Every city in the country should be asking, “Are we next?”

It took years of organizing to defeat gang bans in Oakland, the first community-led effort to do so in the nation. We didn’t achieve it by being silent. We didn’t achieve it by waiting for someone else to act. We have built up enough power to make it politically impossible to continue. Minneapolis proved the same; community resistance forced the federal government to back down.

Thousands of workers, parents, citizens and community members were swept away not because of what they did, but because of how they looked. And people are dead because they refused to look away. We cannot let their deaths be in vain.

Get out of there. Organize. Push back. That’s how we beat the gang ban. So Minneapolis ended the surge. This is how we restore our rights.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.