The Oaklandside25%
Oakland artist detained by ICE for 8 months faces daunting legal challenge 21%
By Azucena Rasilla8%
8/4/2026, 1:01:41 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Hasty Generalization, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.3% saturation with 252 hits. Analysis detected 2,015 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,891 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 27.7% and a BS Rank of 21% (24,126 of 30,213 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 79.90% of the article peer group.
On Dec.
4, 2025, Leandro Oliveira Xavier, a member of SambaFunk!, the renowned Oakland-based cultural organization, attended what he thought was a routine immigration check-in in San Francisco.
Xavier had been going to regular check-ins since he moved to the United States from Salvador Bahia, Brazil, the prior year.
He’d applied for asylum, gotten his job with the arts organization in Oakland, and lived openly awaiting his chance to argue his case, but when he showed up that day, Xavier was arrested by immigration agents — apparently as part of the Trump administration’s policy of relying on people’s court appearances to boost detentions and deportations.
In June, a California federal judge issued an order that blocked ICE agents from making arrests inside immigration courts.
The order applies to ICE agents nationwide.
“What the government is doing is, they’re going after people who are easy to pick up,” said Lisa Knox, the program director for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.
“Because they’re already checking-in, going to court, ironically, the people who are doing everything right, it’s easier to find them and detain them.”
Xavier was taken to ICE’s Mesa Verde Detention Center in Bakersfield and has been held there for over eight months.
Now, his friends, family and colleagues are speaking out.
“It was a scramble for 24 hours to try to figure out where he was being taken, and how to reach him,” said Colin Andrew Logan, one of Xavier’s closest friends.
“It was just a whole nightmare scenario, and we’ve been living out that nightmare since then.”
Logan said that Xavier is being kept in “atrocious conditions.”
A 2025 report by the California Department of Justice found that ICE detention facilities across California fall short in providing basic needs for detainees.
According to the report, “Detainees described the food provided using words such as ‘dog food’ and ‘horrible.’
At Mesa Verde, investigators found that guards overutilized discipline and force.
Other problems involved access to medical care and mental health resources.
“It’s clear to me that this is a manifestation of the inherent and intrinsic violence and racism of the state,” Logan said.
“It’s anti-Black, anti-indigenous racism that he is directly experiencing the impacts of.
It’s not just Leo.
This is not an isolated case.
There’s 1000s of people that are experiencing these conditions.”
In February, Logan launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise $24,000.
According to Logan, the campaign raised the first $10,000 to retain legal services for Xavier.
Now, they are attempting to raise more in hopes that Xavier can get a bond and leave detention.
On Monday, Logan, members of SambaFunk, and various local organizations gathered outside ICE’s field office in San Francisco denouncing Xavier’s arrest and continued detention as akin to “kidnapping” and to demand his immediate release.
We asked ICE about Xavier’s case.
The agency requested that we provide them with his Alien Registration Number assigned to him by the DHS before they would provide us with any sort of statement or answer our questions.
Xavier’s family declined to provide us with this information.
We’ve not yet heard from ICE about why they detained him or what they plan to do.
### A complicated quest to obtain legal status
Logan has been friends with Xavier since 2002, when he was an international exchange student with the Rotary International Youth Exchange Program.
Colin lived in Salvador Bahia, working as a volunteer violin teacher, and Xavier was a percussionist when they met and struck up a friendship over their mutual love of music.
“Leo was a rising star who comes from a long line of artists, musicians, dancers, cultural workers, ceremony keepers in the Candomblé tradition,” Logan said of the West-African religion.
“He has a deep, deep cultural legacy on whose shoulders he stands, and I had the good fortune of connecting with not only him but his entire family and community.”
When Xavier immigrated to the United States, he joined the Afro-Brazilian band Namorados da Lua, or NDL as its lead percussionist.
Logan had been a part of NDL for over a decade.
Around the same time, Xavier also joined SambaFunk!
as a drummer and teacher.
“I could not believe how quickly he made all of these strong friendships.
So many community members love him, and vouch for him,” Logan said.
“His social calendar filled up quickly, and it’s because he is just one of those people that lights up the room when he comes in.
He shows up for people.
He showed up for me consistently.
He just has such strong integrity, kindness, and compassion.”
It was through SambFunk!
that Xavier also met his girlfriend Elena.
She asked not to be identified by her last name.
She’s here on a visa and fears retaliation.
Elena told us that she had her eyes set on Xavier from the moment she first saw him during a gathering with the members of SambaFunk!
But it wasn’t until February of 2025 that the two officially met at a friend’s party.
“I remember trying to talk to him, but he only spoke Portuguese,” Elena said.
“So I would have Colin translate.”
Their connection was instant, and they moved in together a month later.
“I really wanted to have a conversation with him, so I was fully focused while we were spending time together on learning Portuguese,” she said.
“I learned Portuguese in like three months.”
Ever since Xavier was detained, Elena and Logan have made constant trips to Bakersfield to visit him.
Elena told The Oaklandside that it is time for people to know about him and others in similar situations.
“Back when I was really hopeful that he was going to get out, I was very focused on doing all the right things, and I realized since that, with the way the administration is and how anti-immigrant the policies are; I think it is time that people who are vulnerable and people who are already going through this to know that he’s not the only one in there,” Elena said.
“I think there’s maybe a desire to not want to talk about it, especially if there could be retaliation.
But I think at this point I would want to read a story of somebody who’s fighting, who’s continued to fight, who wants to be here.”
Although she is a practicing attorney, Knox, the advocate with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, is not Xavier’s attorney.
But she has been talking with his family, and she is familiar with his situation.
According to Knox, when Xavier entered the country through Mexico in 2024, he was processed, fingerprinted, and released.
From there, he filed for asylum.
Knox said that wait times for court hearings for immigration cases, including asylum claims, vary from months to years.
While an immigrant is waiting for their hearing date before a judge, they are issued a work permit, which allows them to legally work but does not bar them from deportation until their case is decided.
Deportation orders are not new.
Between 2009 and 2015, President Barack Obama’s Administration removed 2.5 million people.
In 2024, deportations under President Biden hit a 10-year high.
“People have a right to seek asylum in the U.S., and it used to be easier for people to go to the border, right to the checkpoint and turn themselves in and request asylum,” said Knox.
“That’s become a lot harder.”
As a result of increasingly anti-immigration policy shifts under President Joseph Biden and especially President Donald Trump, now, many people just cross the border without permission — not at a checkpoint — and then turn themselves in to Border Patrol so they can request asylum, she said.
‘Free Leo’ (featuring Leandro Oliveira xavier and Amani Will)
Xavier wrote a song about his detention.
His family was able to record the audio during one of their phone calls.
Oakland artist Amani Will worked on the song which was released in April.
Colin translated the lyrics.
Real Facts!!
Facts and realities I’m living through:
8 months unjustly detained,
imprisoned by ICE and immigration,
living one day after another with no solution…
They took my last name without explanation
and today I’m only recognized by my number (16 LOW)…
Real human rights that we no longer have,
believing in bail, what suffering.
So many families suffer because of immigration, what a trap.
ICE is destroying nations;
what a crazy world that destroys families…
I ask God for freedom for my brothers and sisters.
We have a life to live our dreams.
Freedom, freedom, freedom!!!
Xavier’s arrest created a sense of urgency to resolve his asylum claim
In March, after he’d been in detention for over three months, Judge William David Neumeister granted Xavier what’s called “withholding of removal.”
This legal protection prevents the U.S government from deporting him to his country of origin, Brazil, but still allows ICE to deport him to a third-party country that accepts deportees.
Judge Neumeister, according to Knox, explained in his ruling that he would have granted Xavier asylum if it wasn’t for the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Rule.
The rule was put in place by the Biden administration three years ago to address what federal officials characterized as a “potential surge of migration at the southwest border.”
This rule made seeking asylum much more difficult.
One provision said that if a person passed through one or more countries before making it to the southern U.S. border, and they hadn’t applied for asylum in one of those countries and been rejected, then they couldn’t apply for asylum in the United States.
The East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a legal services group that supports immigrants fleeing violence and persecution, disagreed with the rule change and filed a lawsuit challenging it.
This year, on May 7, a federal district court judge ruled that the policy is “unlawful.”
But this hasn’t helped Xavier’s case — not yet.
According to Knox, when the policy was struck down, Xavier’s attorney at the time filed a motion seeking to reopen his asylum case.
Judge Neumeister wasn’t able to weigh in on this motion because he had been fired, as part of the Trump administration’s purging of immigration judges.
Xavier’s motion to reopen his asylum case is still pending; however, because the number of judges available to hear it is now a fraction of what it used to be, it’s unclear when he’ll have his day in court.
On Dec.
5, 2025, Xavier’s previous attorney sought a “temporary restraining order” along with a habeas corpus petition to address whether or not his ongoing detention is lawful.
And in April, Xavier and Elena filed another habeas petition without any legal assistance.
Elena and Logan both say they’ll continue fighting in the courts until Xavier is free and able to return to Oakland.
“I marvel constantly at his strength, at his spirit,” Logan said.
“He’s incredibly strong and resilient.
I have experienced a lot of personal grief and heartbreak at the way that the state is torturing my brother and one of my best friends.
He cheers me up when I go to visit him, and lifts my spirits when I’m feeling depressed or feeling anxious or cannot sleep because I’m thinking about how he’s being treated, and is far away from where he belongs with us, his family.”
Speakers
3speakers43%attributed speech1,073writer words
Selected voice
55%flagged-word coverageElena
236 attributed words29% of attributed speech35% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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