Mission Local Presents: The immigration crackdown and resistance in San Francisco

Mission Local Presents: The immigration crackdown and resistance in San Francisco Tuesday, December 16, 2025 View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests. Mission Local is hosting a panel discussion about the immigration crackdown in San Francisco and what our community has been doing to resist. Following the panel there will be a chance to learn about volunteer opportunities and to connect with others in the audience. • 6:00 – 6:30PM Explore resources and learn how San Franciscans are protecting our communities • 8:00 – 8:30PM Community conversation and resource fair Angela Chan is an Assistant Chief Attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender's Office. She oversees the Confront + Advocate team, which confronts state violence and advances community-led solutions. She leads efforts with community partners to pass local and state policies that dismantle the carceral system and expand support for system-impacted people. Her team also uncovers law-enforcement misconduct and drives strategic communications to challenge state-sponsored harm. Before joining the Public Defender’s Office, Angela spent over 15 years at Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, where she was the Policy Director and also launched the nation’s first Criminal Justice Reform Program at an Asian and Pacific Islander civil rights organization. She co-founded FREESF and the statewide ICE out of CA coalition, helping pass landmark Sanctuary laws—including the TRUST Act, TRUTH Act, CA Values Act, and local Sanctuary Ordinance protections—as well as the Pardon and Commutation Reform Act of 2018. Angela previously served on the San Francisco Police Commission. She holds a B.A. from Occidental College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Antonella is a social worker and mother from Peru. She moved to the Bay Area two years ago after developing a career in social work for children. Due to escalating violence and threats targeted towards her work, Antonella made the difficult decision to seek asylum in the United States. Today, she is a committed advocate for immigrant rights and, drawing from her own experience of unlawful detention, speaks out on behalf of those navigating the immigration system. Marissa is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Racial Justice Team at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco. She is one of the lead attorneys on Pablo Sequen v. Albarran, a lawsuit challenging ICE’s practices of ambushing and arresting people at immigration courts and holding them for extended periods in inhumane conditions. The Pablo Sequen legal team recently won a preliminary injunction requiring ICE to improve the conditions at the holding facility at 630 Sansome in downtown San Francisco. Prior to LCCRSF, Marissa worked on disability rights in state prisons and taught in the Civil Rights Clinic at Georgetown Law, where she oversaw litigation in state and federal courts on a variety of issues including police misconduct, state-sanctioned surveillance of racial justice organizers, and inhumane medical treatment by private prison contractors. Marissa has litigated and tried impact cases in over a dozen federal and appellate jurisdictions, with a focus on racial justice and the carceral state. Milli Atkinson is the director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program run by the Justice and Diversity Center at the Bar Association of San Francisco. In this role, she works to uphold access to justice for low-income and unrepresented immigrants and operates the Attorney of the Day program— a program which provides free legal representation to immigrants in the Bay Area. In response to the immigration crackdown by the Trump Administration, Atkinson has been leading the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative (SFILDC) since 2017. Through their rapid response work, she has coordinated intakes and referrals, conducted legal training, and filed habeas petitions on behalf of individuals detained during courthouse arrests. Atkinson began as an attorney for Centro de Ayuda Legal para Inmigrantes and later became a supervising attorney for the Immigration Center for Women and Children (ICWC) in San Francisco. There, she provided pro bono representation to recently arrived children and their families before the San Francisco Immigration Court. Shira Levine is the incoming Deputy Legal Director at the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area (IIBA). She served as an immigration judge in San Francisco from 2021 to 2025, until she was fired as part of the recent nationwide terminations of immigration judges. Before joining the bench, Shira worked as an attorney at two Bay Area nonprofits—Centro Legal de la Raza and IIBA—where she represented asylum seekers and other noncitizens in removal proceedings. Since leaving the bench, she has been working with advocates and organizations to build the Bay Area Habeas Network to address ICE arrests. She has also begun a historical research project