OAKLAND — With its cathedral ceiling and a tall, red chimney, the house on 79th Avenue hardly stands out in a quiet, working-class East Oakland neighborhood where residents tend to look out for one another.
Each morning, four of the young men who lived there would shuffle into an SUV parked out front, headed to their jobs at an East Bay fast-food joint. One of them had recently been promoted to kitchen manager, his mother said.
The neighbors never saw any cause for concern. So they were left shaken when, late on the afternoon on Aug. 12, seven people were taken from the house on 79th Avenue near Hillside Street, swept into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans and driven away to be held in detention facilities around the country.
The 10 people who lived there, a mix of extended family members and a pair of housemates, are all originally from Honduras and hold varying immigration statuses. An attorney for the detainees said none had criminal backgrounds. A search of federal criminal records turned up no cases for them.
Now, several of the residents are being held at a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, while a 17-year-old with Down syndrome was kept in San Francisco for a few nights last week before being transferred to a facility in New York state.
Norma Torres, whose son — Kenneth Mena Torres — was among those arrested, described a jarring moment when ICE agents brusquely entered their home to scan the face of each person living there. She asked where the detainees would be taken, but the agents offered no explanations.
“They were very rude,” she said in Spanish, “and treated us all very badly.”
View of the 2700 block of 79th Street in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. A group of undocumented residents, including a 17-year-old, were arrested by ICE at their home in this neighborhood last week.(Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Norma shared Kenneth’s name with this news organization, along with those of three other detainees: Eleazor Saul Galo, Carlos Ariel Reyes Ávila and Kency Joana Torres Ávila, the last of whom is Norma’s niece.
ICE, which did not respond to requests for more details of the Aug. 12 arrests, has aggressively ramped up its enforcement in the Bay Area this year under directives from President Donald Trump. Last week, Trump attacked Oakland and other cities over their struggles with crime while sending the National Guard in to police Washington D.C.
The federal agency’s targeting of a single house — rather than deploying a larger sweep or raid — suggests a focused enforcement effort in the East Bay.
Deportations of migrants in the Bay Area have included those with no criminal backgrounds who were actively working with government officials to formalize their immigration status and detained while attending mandatory court hearings, including a Livermore father who was deported in June to Mexico.
Norma Torres, who along with two others was not arrested, migrated to the U.S. in 2013, with her son joining three years later. She has a green card, she said, while her son had been waiting on his own after receiving permission from immigration officials to live and work here in 2020.
Both are listed in property records as owners of the East Oakland home. The other residents had been paying them rent to live there.
“They are hard-working people,” Torres said of the detainees. “They haven’t hurt anybody, and they weren’t making any trouble. They just want to live here and go to their jobs.”
A view taken on Aug. 19, 2025 of 79th Avenue in East Oakland, not far from where ICE detained several people, including a 17-year-old boy, last week. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Across the street from the house, neighbor Anthony Striplin has kept a watchful eye on what goes on in his neighborhood, which sits a few blocks from the former Greenside housing project that was demolished in 2013.
He saw the men at the opposite house dutifully head out to work each morning. When ICE vehicles lined the block a week ago, Striplin could not understand why — “leave these people alone,” he griped.
Some of the elderly homeowners in the neighborhood have lived there for decades. The area is not immune to crime, but 60-year-old Tony Lewis said ICE rolling up on the block bears far worse trauma than anything else the community has dealt with.
“You just can’t come in somebody’s house for nothing,” Lewis said. “That’s just like, the Ku Klux Klan coming up to my house — it’s the same thing!”
The dramatic uptick in activity by immigration authorities has strained public life among migrants across California, leading many to avoid public spaces where ICE officers may be present.
“It takes a lot of courage just to go to work right now,” said a worker, Candida, whose last name was omitted in a statement provided by the California Fast Food Workers union. A manager at the restaurant that employed the people detained in Oakland declined to comment.
California leaders are clashing with Trump in increasingly hostile fashion on the immigration issue, especially after the president in June deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles over protests of ICE there. The trial in a subsequent lawsuit by state Attorney General Rob Bonta against the Trump administration concluded last week.
Protesters march from the Morgan Hill cultural center to the ICE office in Morgan Hill, Calif., on Thursday, July 17, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
There has not been much confirmed ICE activity in Oakland this year, with the Aug. 12 arrests the only recent sighting verified by the Alameda County Legal Education Parternship’s rapid response hotline.
Torres, meanwhile, has had trouble keeping track of where her loved ones are in the system, with her information solely coming from a Centro Legal de la Raza attorney, Nikolas De Bremaeker.
After first alerting local news media about the arrests last week, De Bremaeker did not respond to a follow-up interview request. He mentioned at a recent news conference that, in recent days, a hefty case load was regularly keeping him at work late into the night.
ICE’s official directory offers little clarity. Carlos Ariel Reyes Ávila, the only name among the detainees that returns a search result, is listed as being in custody at the detention center in Tacoma. But immigration advocates say updates to the database often take several days at a time.
The neighborhood where Torres lives was mostly quiet on an afternoon this week — some music rumbling from a house nearby and the occasional bicycle horn sounded by a street vendor selling popular Latino snacks, including chicharrones de harina.
Torres is grateful to the attorneys who are helping her family. But given the national climate, she doubts there’s any way for the loved ones who shared her home to avoid deportation.
“A miracle of God,” she said of her hopes. “That’s all there can be.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at [email protected].