ICE arrests San Diego coffee shop owner who holds valid work permit

Asylum seeker wears GPS ankle monitor, reports almost weekly to ICE

Assim Alkhawaja, a 53-year-old San Diego coffee shop owner, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in February while dropping off two Lyft passengers at Camp Pendleton, the sprawling military base in San Diego County. He holds a valid work permit, has a pending asylum case and no criminal convictions, and earned a doctorate from the University of San Francisco — none of which, he said, kept him from being handcuffed and taken into custody.

Alkhawaja spent the next eight days in an ICE detention center and was placed in removal proceedings. His left ankle now carries a bulky GPS tracker, the kind typically given to high-risk individuals on parole, and he must report to immigration officials on an almost-weekly basis, either at the San Diego courthouse or through home visits, to prove he has not absconded.

“I keep questioning myself,” Alkhawaja said outside the courthouse on a June morning. “Is this America?”

Deep inside San Diego’s federal courthouse, he sat on the floor outside a nondescript office awaiting his ICE-mandated appointment, while government signs nearby encouraged people without legal status to self-deport. “Leave on your own terms,” they read in several languages. “Claim a free flight and an exit bonus for each member of your family.” Staff who work for a program overseen by ICE ask him the same questions nearly every week — where he lives, whether he works, occasionally why he is applying for asylum. This time, there was a new one: how are you feeling?

ICE has removed more than 16,000 people from the San Diego region alone between January 2025 and April of this year, the Guardian reported, and this summer arrests across the nation have picked up again, with a record number of immigrants arrested since Trump took office for the second time. Johnson, an associate attorney at a San Diego immigration law firm who is representing Alkhawaja, said arrests move from place to place — outside courthouses, in the streets.

“The tactics change, but the goal is the same – to make it harder for people to want to fight their case here, and to make them just give up,” Johnson said.

According to Alkhawaja’s retelling, he pulled up to Camp Pendleton’s main gate around 6 p.m., where all drivers entering the base are asked to show their driver’s licenses. He handed his valid license to a guard, who scanned it. “Wait a minute,” the man told him. When the guard returned, he asked for another form of identification; Alkhawaja produced his active work permit, which expires in February 2030. The guard returned a second time, Alkhawaja said, with two ICE agents, who asked whether he had a court date for his asylum case. He said he did not.

“You’re coming with us,” they told him, and he was handcuffed — his wrists and ankles connected by a chain that wrapped around his waist. “It was as if I assassinated the president,” he said.

Agents took his phone, all of his identification, including his Costco card, and the shoelaces from his shoes, he said. He was placed in a van, jumping to get inside while wearing the restrictive handcuffs, and driven to an office in downtown San Diego, where he said an agent offered him $3,000 to leave the country immediately rather than be detained. He refused. Later that night, another van took him to the Otay Mesa detention center, one of the largest immigration detention facilities in California, where he would spend more than a week.

Inside the facility, Alkhawaja said, officials took the rest of his belongings — his hat, belt and jacket — and gave him a navy blue uniform with “DETAINEE” printed on the back in large block letters. He was assigned to a room with eight other people. Detainees could not use the restroom during the night, he said, and the drinking water smelled and tasted bad; phone calls, snacks and hygiene products all cost money. Alkhawaja described the experience bluntly: “We’re like cattle, animals. The process of transferring the detainee is really unhuman.”

CoreCivic, the company that manages Otay Mesa, said in an emailed statement that the “safety, health and wellbeing of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority” and that the facility’s water comes from “the same municipal source used by the surrounding San Diego community.”

Camp Pendleton has worked with ICE agents since at least 2025, when the base launched a “security initiative” with ICE to support “identity verification and access screening operations,” the Guardian reported. Across the county, ICE arrests at military bases have spiked. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in an email that immigration officers “have the authority to question, without warrant, any alien or person believed to be an alien concerning his or her right to be, or to remain, in the United States.”

Alkhawaja’s attorney said the arrest reflects a widening “grey area” between what is considered lawful and unlawful in ever-evolving immigration law. Asylum seekers can apply for and receive a specific type of work permit while their cases are pending, Johnson said, but obtaining that permit does not mean they technically have “legal status” in the United States.

“It puts people in a bad spot, where they’re like: ‘But I did the right thing, I applied for asylum within the timeframe, and it’s not my fault that it’s pending,’” she said. “You can do everything right and you can still get screwed.”

In response to questions about how the arrest unfolded, the DHS spokesperson, who described Alkhawaja as “a criminal illegal alien from Saudi Arabia,” argued that Alkhawaja had also been arrested for “disorderly conduct” more than two decades prior. “All of his claims will be heard by a judge,” the spokesperson said. “Despite his criminal history, this illegal alien was released on bond pending immigration proceedings.”

Alkhawaja said the apparent reference was to a 2002 trip to the United States, when he and an American friend were arrested during a night out in San Diego after chatting with a woman he later concluded was an undercover police officer posing as a sex worker. He said he was released once they reached the station and, to his knowledge, was never charged with a crime. Johnson confirmed that Alkhawaja has no criminal convictions on his record.

“I believe they are bringing this up to try to justify their actions,” Johnson said of the DHS comments. “The reality is a 2002 arrest when he was visiting his family here, without more, does not bar him from seeking asylum.”

Alkhawaja, who is Palestinian and was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, said he decided to apply for asylum in 2024, after years of visiting family and studying in the United States, because he feared for his life back home. He and Johnson requested that specific details of his case be withheld due to safety concerns. His next official hearing is scheduled for October.

Alkhawaja owns Sands Coffee Roasters, a small family-run business that began as a coffee cart in Oceanside and expanded into a neighboring brick-and-mortar shop over the past year. On the June morning of his appointment, he drove straight from the courthouse to a San Diego shipping facility to pick up coffee beans imported from specialty farms in Brazil and Colombia, unloading half a dozen burlap sacks into the back of his pickup truck as workers called him “sir.” “I’m more confident here,” he said. “We switch, we have to survive.”

Inside the shop hang a photo of his family’s ancestral home in Palestine and a traditional Palestinian embroidery, called tatreez, that his mother made for him. Its center reads, in Arabic: “May Allah protect you.” Alkhawaja said he has not seen his mother, who now lives elsewhere in the Middle East, for two years; when she asks when he is coming to visit, he tells her what she wants to hear — maybe after the summer, he says.

Since his release, Alkhawaja said, he has been struck by the support around him: a GoFundMe set up on his behalf, dozens of mothers from a local activist group who drove to his coffee shop with their children, and strangers who trickle in to tell him, “We heard about you, and we just want to tell you that this is not right.”

If he is granted asylum, Alkhawaja’s plan is to keep running the coffee shop and “live normally, like others.” “I want here to be home,” he said. “I started, and it’s hard to start again somewhere else.” But in the end, he acknowledged, it is not up to him. His family members wish him good luck before each check-in, he said. “It’s as if I’m going to a battlefield.”