Here are the morning’s top stories on Friday, June 6, 2025…
- Immigrant-serving groups across the Bay Area are condemning a Trump administration travel ban that will bar most of the citizens of nineteen countries from entering the U.S.
- Immigration lawyers and advocates say at least 15 people including some children were arrested outside of ICE offices in San Francisco on Wednesday.
- A Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge has approved a temporary restraining order blocking efforts to restart the Refugio Oil Spill pipeline.
Immigrant-serving groups across the Bay Area condemned a new Trump administration travel ban that — with a handful of exceptions — will bar most citizens of nineteen countries from entering the U.S.
The ban, announced in a proclamation by President Donald Trump Wednesday night, will “fully restrict and limit the entry” of nationals from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. It will partially restrict entry of nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. People who hold a U.S. green card, and immediate family members of U.S. citizens, are among those exempted.
Aarti Kohli, executive director of San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus, called the ban “draconian” and said it echoed other episodes of discriminatory profiling, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the surveillance of Muslim Americans after the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombing. “For most of us, there is nothing we wouldn’t do to make sure our families are safe and together … This policy will tear families apart worldwide,” said Kohli. “This sweeping travel ban is just one tool in a broader strategy to consolidate power by scapegoating communities and manufacturing fear.”
The president’s proclamation revives, in altered form, a travel ban Trump imposed in his first term. And it comes as part of a broader crackdown on immigrants, including arrests at immigration courts and routine immigration check-ins, an attempt to revoke thousands of international student visas, suspension of the nation’s refugee program and a shut-down of asylum consideration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
More than a dozen people, including a 3-year-old child, were arrested at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco on Wednesday, according to advocates and local political leaders.
