ICE agents tackled a man in Emeryville on 16 October, and one of them, an agent his attorney says weighs 280 pounds, sat on his chest and fractured six of his ribs. The agents took him to Highland Hospital in Oakland and stayed with him there. His attorney says the agent who tackled him has been "sitting on his bed, grinning at him."
The ICE List, which is kept by the Crust News team along with volunteers, has identified one of the agents involved in the assault as ICE officer Michael Caldwell. Nine days before the arrest, on 7 October, Caldwell was in a federal courtroom in San Francisco, called as a witness at the trial of protester Caleb Ranney, the court minutes show. Ranney was charged over a 2025 protest outside the ICE field office at 630 Sansome Street, and a jury found him not guilty on 9 October.
We will not be naming the victim of the assault. As of Thursday he was still in ICE custody, according to his attorney, Nikolas De Bremaeker of Centro Legal de la Raza.
ICE says the man tried to assault officers and refused lawful commands, and that he told agents he already had an injury from falling off a ladder two days earlier. "Officers relied on their training to control the situation," an ICE spokesperson said. The Department of Homeland Security says its officers "are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary."
A 280-pound agent sitting on a man's chest until six of his ribs break is not the minimum amount of force, especially as the victim can be heard screaming for the agent to get off, in footage reviewed by Crust News.
At Highland, De Bremaeker says the agents tried to block the man's access to his lawyer, tried to direct his medical treatment and asked staff for his medical information. Highland sits on county land covered by Alameda County's ICE-free zone ordinance, and its own staff wrote to administrators that his arrival "highlighted major hazards to the rights and safety of our patients." Alameda Health System says law enforcement does not direct treatment and that ICE vehicles on its grounds are there only for the patient in custody. Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez has said the zones do not keep immigration agents off county property, and at Highland they did not.
The arrest is one of six that Mission Local verified across the Bay Area in a single week, four of them violent and two ending in hospital. In Oakland, agents smashed a truck driver's car window with a hammer, used a baton to try to pry his leg out of the car and slammed him onto the pavement; by the time he reached the ICE processing centre in San Francisco he could not walk, and a federal judge ordered his release. In SoMa, a plainclothes agent ran across Sixth Street with his gun drawn. "We are definitely seeing an increase in violence used in ICE arrests," De Bremaeker said. The violence follows ICE's order to its agents to hit 3,000 arrests a day before the midterms.
Caldwell was filmed in February at an ICE stop of a truck driver near the Port of Oakland, which is now on his ICE List record alongside the Emeryville arrest.
If Caldwell arrested you or someone you know, or you have footage of him at work, send it to the ICE List. Your identity is not recorded.
Michael Caldwell testified in a federal courtroom on 7 October. Nine days later, he was involved in an assault that broke six of a man's ribs. That is the kind of person employed by the Trump regime during the push to militarise the streets of the USA.
