Federal agents detained immigrants and held them on California's Coast Guard Island in the 1980s

Audio By Carbonatix

Last week was not the first time Coast Guard Island in the Oakland Estuary has been in the spotlight related to the federal government’s deportation campaigns against immigrants.

In 1982, the man-made island between Oakland and Alameda played a role in “Project Jobs,” an initiative launched by President Ronald Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service that deported thousands of immigrants to Mexico. In late April and early May, during a recession and a period of high unemployment, federal agents swarmed factories, marched into vineyards and mushroom farms and raided sheet metal plants to arrest immigrant workers who held “high-paying” jobs — anything paying more than the $3.35 an hour minimum wage. Reagan’s administration said those jobs should go to citizens.

Agents conducted more than 50 raids in Northern California, including in Oakland and Santa Rosa, and arrested hundreds of workers. Unlike today’s raids, the agents did not wear masks, but they used familiar tactics, according to a lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Agents swept up U.S. citizens, detained immigrants without probable cause to suspect they were in the country without legal authorization, kept them in handcuffs for hours without telling them their rights, and harassed others to sign away their legal rights.

Many of those detained were transferred to Coast Guard Island, then called Government Island, where they were herded into the island’s basketball gym and forced to wait until they could be loaded into buses headed toward the southern border.

A different scene played out last week. Word got out that President Trump was sending federal agents to the Bay Area to ramp up its detention campaign. Early on Oct. 23, caravans of masked agents with Customs and Border Protection began to arrive on the island, a federal installation situated between Oakland and Alameda and one of the largest Coast Guard bases on the West Coast.

Approximately 150 protesters gathered at the bridge connecting the island to Oakland, shouting “shame” and other slogans as cars entered. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced at 10 a.m. that Trump had called off the troops. Demonstrators left, but not before a few had been injured in clashes with agents, including a pastor hit in the face with a chemical weapon. On Thursday night, agents shot a man in the stomach who allegedly backed up a U-Haul rental truck and rammed it into some barricades. A bystander was struck by a fragment but was not seriously injured.

The $1 million operation in 1982 captured 5,400 workers living in the country illegally in the Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Newark, Detroit and Denver, according to newspaper reports of the time. One of those arrested was an AC Transit bus driver in the East Bay.

Around 4,000 of those detained were deported but a quarter of those returned to the United States within a month, with more coming later, according to a widely publicized study done by Rice University Professor Donald L. Huddle. About 1,000 citizens applied for the jobs that the immigrants had been forced to vacate, according to an April 28, 1982, article in the Santa Barbara News Press.

The raids, like those conducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents today, spread fear through the Latino community.

“They’re afraid to go to work,” said one legal immigrant at a San Francisco press conference called by labor leaders to denounce the actions, according to the Petaluma Argus Courier. “They’re afraid to go out of their houses. … Agents have been known to pick up parents and leave small children behind if they don’t happen to be home at the moment.”

Officials and institutions ranging from Gov. Jerry Brown, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, the Oakland City Council, and the editorial board of the Berkeley Gazette denounced the raids as racist. One prominent syndicated newspaper columnist said the sweeps were “Nazi-like,” and reminiscent of the German Gestapo.

“Project Jobs” is a “publicity ploy and a diversion” meant to distract people from the real issue of unemployment, which stood at an average of 9.7% in 1982, Gov. Brown said. He pointed out that the U.S. routinely deported 1 million people a year but usually did it without fanfare.

An April 30, 1982, a Berkeley Gazette editorial called the raids “an empty gesture brought on by an administration increasingly frustrated at its inability to control either illegal immigration or unemployment.”

The raids followed a period in which President Reagan tried to take tighter control over unauthorized immigration. In 1981, he sought the power to declare an “immigration emergency” that would allow him to close ports, seize ships on the high seas and limit judicial authority in immigration matters.

The U.S. Attorney for Northern California, Joseph Russioniello, echoing modern-day accusations of election fraud, asked district attorneys and voting officials for the names of those who had registered for bilingual ballots. He planned to check those applications against a list of naturalized citizens to look for voters who were eligible to vote.

In 1986, however, Reagan signed a sweeping bill that granted amnesty and a pathway to citizenship for 3 million people who were illegally residing in the country and had come before 1982. The federal government created an employment verification system to implement those requirements and made it illegal for the first time for employers to knowingly hire workers without proper documents.

Congress has not taken significant action on immigration since then.

The U.S. has long used mass deportations as a mechanism to control immigration, according to Adam Goodman, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author of the 2020 book, “The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants.” Before “Project Jobs,” there was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 “Operation Wetback,” where 1.1 million people, including some U.S. citizens, were deported. It was named after an ethnic slur for Mexicans who waded across the Rio Grande.

After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which ended Mexican guest worker programs but set a cap for the first time on the number of people who could emigrate from there, deportations reached an average of more than 900,000 people a year. (That number dipped significantly in the early 2000s.)

The courts cannot handle a high number of deportation proceedings, so the U.S. has routinely and deliberately created hostile environments, such as Project Jobs, to get immigrant workers so afraid they leave on their own, Goodman writes in “The Deportation Machine.” More than three-quarters of the 57 million expulsions in U.S. history have been conducted through this voluntary departure scenario, said Goodman.

“Formal deportation proceedings are brought only in aggravated cases since they involve considerable expense and delay, and voluntary return is usually the most satisfactory way of dealing with this enormous volume of cases,” an attorney for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said in the 1970s, according to Goodman.

Getting migrants to leave voluntarily in an atmosphere of fear has also been Trump’s approach. In an Oct. 27 press release, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that about 1.5 million workers without legal documents departed voluntarily in 2025, while another 527,000 were deported. (Some immigration experts believe the number of people who’ve “self-deported” is much lower than the administration claims.)

Many of those detained were sent to prisons with extreme conditions, such as Alligator Alcatraz, a makeshift detention center in the Florida Everglades. A seamstress at a Berkeley shop with no apparent criminal record said she was denied toilet paper and water by ICE during her deportation to India. Trump also sent hundreds of Venezuelans suspected of having gang ties to El Salvador’s maximum-security prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Many immigrant workers have decided to leave rather than face detention in such inhumane conditions.

“Day-in and day-out, DHS law enforcement is removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from American communities, including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and more,” stated Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in the press release, who added that the vast majority of those arrested were “criminal illegal aliens charged with or convicted of a crime in the U.S.”

Data from the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley dispute this claim. Data show that around 70% of those arrested by ICE had no criminal convictions, with only 8-10% having serious violent offenses.

In 1982, as is the case today, immigration advocates turned to the courts to argue that the raids violated workers’ constitutional rights. The advocates won some victories in the lower courts, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled that it was constitutional for immigration agents to surround a factory, block the exits, and enter to seize anyone who was not a U.S. citizen.

While the courts today are in disagreement over the legality of Trump sending in the National Guard to states that have not requested those troops, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that federal agents can detain people based on factors like race, accent or occupation. Agents can stop people because they have brown skin or speak Spanish, rather than needing to have a reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime. Of course, millions of U.S. citizens fit that description, but U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said they shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

But a recent ProPublica investigation found nearly 200 U.S. citizens had been detained during immigration enforcement operations this year, held in custody for days and dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents.

The sight of masked ICE agents rushing into neighborhoods and detaining people who are working, walking, picking up their kids from school, or just getting coffee has prompted thousands of Bay Area residents to take to the streets to protest.

Bill Urban of East Oakland came to Coast Guard Island with his dog, Rosie, early on Oct. 23, to express his concern over personal liberties. Federal agents had come to the Bay Area “to deprive people of their human rights and terrorize our community,” he told a Berkeleyside reporter.

___

This story was originally published by Berkeleyside and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.