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No confirmed Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were reported to legal aid groups in the Bay Area Sunday, advocates said, despite an expected wave of detentions that had sparked fear in the region’s immigrant communities.

Activists had been bracing for a nationwide operation to detain at least 2,000 undocumented people who had been ordered by courts to leave the country, recruiting extra volunteers to staff hotlines collecting reports about ICE activity across the region.

But instead of the flood of calls that some expected to receive starting early Sunday morning, it was relatively quiet.

“There’s been zero confirmed reports of ICE activity so far” anywhere in Northern California, said Hamid Yazdan Panah, an attorney with the San Francisco Bar Association who helps coordinate legal assistance for individuals detained locally.

Several other advocates across the Bay Area said the same thing. “It’s been quiet, and we’re glad to hear that,” said Rose Arrieta, a spokeswoman with the immigrant rights group Causa Justa.

It’s still possible that detentions could have happened in the Bay Area without the groups receiving reports, or that the agency could detain individuals later this week. The operation was expected to last multiple days, according to media reports.

An ICE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Matthew Albence, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to give specifics about ICE operations during an interview on Fox News Sunday morning, but said the agency was conducting “targeted enforcement actions against specific individuals.”

“These are individuals who have come to this country illegally and had the opportunity to make an asylum claim in front of an immigration judge,” he said. “Most of them chose not to avail themselves of that opportunity and didn’t even show up for their first hearing.”

Still, when agents detain individuals they also often pick up “collateral” undocumented immigrants who they find in the course of an operation.

The agency’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco — the site of protests in recent days — was silent around midmorning, with no one entering or leaving over the course of about an hour. Several cars and a bus sat motionless in the fenced-off parking lot, where detained immigrants are typically dropped off.

Zero signs of activity at ICE office in San Francisco #ICEraids pic.twitter.com/m8oKGDXD54 — Casey Tolan (@caseytolan) July 14, 2019

Other cities that had been listed as targets also had few or no reports of ICE activity Sunday morning. The Miami Herald reported that expected raids in South Florida had “failed to materialize,” and similar reports came in from Chicago, Houston and elsewhere. Agents tried to detain several people in New York City on Saturday but were denied entry into residences they were targeting because they didn’t have warrants, local officials said.

Still, the threat of raids alone had an impact Sunday, with noticeably fewer people on the streets and at businesses and churches in some immigrant neighborhoods in the Bay Area and around the country, according to community leaders.

Rev. Moises Agudo, the pastor of three Catholic churches in San Francisco’s Mission District, said the sense of fear was palpable in his mostly Latino parish, which includes many families of mixed citizenship status.

“People are scared not just to come to church but just to leave the house. Many people I know are telling their job that they are sick because they don’t want to go out,” Agudo said. “We have a lot of immigrants, and they cannot live like this.”

Advocates had reported a small spike in ICE activity starting last weekend in several Bay Area counties, and some said they believed that was a sign that the reported operation was already in process.

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Judges: Trump can’t exclude people from district drawings “We think they already began rolling out the operation last week, so it may very well be ICE isn’t doing anything today to avoid how much attention and scrutiny they’re getting,” Panah said. “The national announcement and all the hype surrounding it is part of the political agenda of this administration.”

The prospect of wide-scale immigration raids was first raised by President Trump last month before being postponed amid objections from homeland security officials and members of Congress. Reports about the operation beginning this weekend led rights groups to urge undocumented people to stay home and not answer the door.

Bay Area rights groups had also worried that a wave of detainees could be denied legal assistance. On Saturday, a federal judge in San Francisco denied a request by a local nonprofit for a restraining order against ICE preventing the agency from moving to deport any individuals this weekend before they had the chance to meet with a lawyer. But the judge, James Donato, noted that ICE has said it would provide a list of legal services agencies that detainees would be allowed to call, and wrote that he expected the agency to do so.

Staff writer Joseph Geha contributed reporting.