Immigrant detentions on San Diego’s military bases have spiked under Trump

Stephanie Alcala has seen a lot as an attorney representing immigrants in Southern California. But a case last year involving the father of a Camp Pendleton Marine is one that still haunts her.

U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested the man as he was dropping his son off at the base after a family Thanksgiving dinner. He spent the next five months at the Otay Mesa Detention Center.

“He spent all of Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day detained,” Alcala said.

The man was one of five people who were detained at military bases she's represented since President Donald Trump returned to power last year. None had criminal records. They are among dozens of people arrested on bases during the second Trump administration, according to records reviewed by KPBS.

Another case that Alcala found particularly cruel involved a woman searching for a cup of coffee after dropping her kid off at elementary school. Her usual coffee shop was closed. So she looked up a random coffee shop on her phone and followed the GPS directions right into a military base.

“She was held for about a week by (Customs and Border Protection) without being given the opportunity of even a phone call,” Alcala said. “Her family didn’t know where she was. They didn’t know if she had just disappeared.”

It’s unclear exactly how many immigrants federal agents have arrested at San Diego’s six military bases. Neither the Department of Defense nor ICE have publicly shared the records.

But the increase has coincided with a May 2025 announcement by Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton that it had entered into a joint security initiative with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The initiative’s goal was to “deter unauthorized installation access by foreign nationals and reinforce layered base defense strategies in alignment with national security objectives,” according to a press release announcing the initiative.

It was originally described as a “proof-of-concept” and has since expanded to other military facilities in San Diego.

Activists with the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative — formerly known as Habeas Dockets — found at least 44 cases of people arrested in military bases in San Diego since the start of the current Trump administration.

That number is likely an undercount because it only represents people released from the Otay Mesa Detention Center after winning habeas corpus cases in federal court, according to John Cronan, founder of the transparency initiative.

Writ of habeas corpus petitions are federal lawsuits that challenge the government’s ability to detain people indefinitely. As a legal concept, habeas corpus has been around since before the founding of the United States. The Founders included the legal protection in the U.S. Constitution in response to British troops illegally detaining colonists.

As of June 7, lawyers have filed more than 52,000 habeas corpus petitions in federal courts nationwide.

Habeas cases describe other examples of people accidentally wandering onto military bases — like a man looking for a Jersey Mike’s sandwich spot, a surfer who accidentally wandered onto Camp Pendleton, and the fiancee of an active duty service member detained at the Miramar air show.

A Camp Pendleton spokesperson deferred all questions from KPBS to ICE. A spokesperson for ICE declined to comment on individual cases, but confirmed ICE agents are helping verify identification at entry points to military bases.

Drivers are most vulnerable

Most commonly, cases involve rideshare and delivery drivers.

That’s what happened to Jose Diaz on March 31, when he was driving for Lyft. He drove onto Camp Pendleton to pick someone up — something he had done dozens of times during the Biden administration.

But this time, things were different.

Diaz said that when he arrived at the Camp Pendleton entrance, he showed guards his driver’s license, valid work permit and the Lyft app confirming the pickup location.

A guard called ICE agents and told Diaz to wait. At first, he said, he wasn’t nervous. Diaz has been in the country four years, works, files taxes and doesn’t have a criminal record.

The federal agents detained him anyway. They cuffed his wrists, ankles and waist before loading him into a transport van. Joining him in the van were two DoorDash drivers who’d also been arrested that day.

“They treat you like a criminal,” Diaz said in Spanish.

He spent six weeks in the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The privately run immigrant jail charges federal taxpayers roughly $200 a day to keep someone in custody, according to a budget overview from the Department of Homeland Security. 

Diaz said he mostly passed the time watching television and talking to other rideshare drivers. Some days he was so bored, time seemed to slow down to a crawl, he said. He’d stare at a clock, wait a while, look back and see that only one or two minutes had passed.

Even though immigration detention is technically civic detention, Diaz said he felt like a prisoner. His movements were restricted and he could only eat at certain times.

The food was mostly bland, but not horrible, he said. Except one time when he said he found a worm in his salad.

Diaz supports deporting immigrants who break the law, or even those who accept government welfare without working for it. But he said it is deeply unfair to use criminal immigrants as a justification to detain people who follow the rules.

“They are persecuting us because of those other people,” he said. “And we’re the ones who just want to work here.”

Arrests at military facilities have become so common among San Diego rideshare and delivery drivers that they are now starting to warn each other through WhatsApp and Facebook groups or word-of-mouth — like when they are all waiting for pickups at the airport.

The risk has become an open secret, said Valentin, a driver and organizer who asked KPBS not to share his full name because of his lack of legal status. “We have to take precautions because we’re always at risk,” he said.

Valentin encourages all immigrant drivers to cancel trips to military bases or ask if they can be dropped off outside the base. He said service members are usually sympathetic to his plight.

“Some of them understand, they are supportive,” he said.

But the lost income is significant. By not accepting rides or deliveries to military bases, drivers like Valentin lose between 10% and 15% of their weekend earnings. That’s because driving sailors and Marines back to their barracks after a night out can be lucrative, he said.

'Because they could'

Diaz’s lawyer, Alcala, still remembers hearing the anguish in Diaz’s voice when he’d ask her why he was being detained.

She didn’t have an answer for him. People with pending immigration cases, a documented work history and no criminal record are not supposed to be detained, she said.

“It’s frustrating because there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “I’m supposed to be the person who is supposed to be able to fix it and I can’t fix it.”

Eventually, Alcala was able to secure Diaz’s release by filing a habeas petition.

She said she does not believe arresting working immigrants with legal status in military bases improves national security. She said it is part of a broader strategy by the Trump administration to put as many people as possible in detention and try to pressure them into self-deportation.

“The detention was primarily because they could,” Alcala said.

She now tells all of her clients to avoid military bases unless they are permanent residents or U.S. citizens.

Jose Diaz no longer drives for Lyft or Uber. He only works his construction job for a roofing company and chef job at a Mexican restaurant. Before the arrest, he was thinking of saving up for a house. But he no longer sees the U.S. as a safe long-term option.

“Is it worth it to work so hard and follow the rules in this country if they’re just going to treat me like a criminal anyway?” he said.