Federal parking at San Francisco’s Golden Gateway Garage came through a private operator and the General Services Administration, and the city’s contract, its new ICE-free law and federal supremacy doctrine each bear on what officials can do next.
The Golden Gateway Garage sits under a two-acre park in the Financial District, a few blocks from the federal immigration offices at 630 Sansome Street. Its 1,095 spaces serve downtown commuters and visitors, with reserved monthly rates of $545. Some of them, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency now says, have been assigned to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The agency confirmed the arrangement after Mission Local reported on Friday night that unmarked vehicles with federal license plates, among them a row of white vans, filled a barricaded section of the garage at 250 Clay Street. Officials have framed their response as a question about local law and the city’s contract. A review of the contract, the city’s sanctuary ordinances and the federal case law on sanctuary policies shows that the answer is less settled than either side’s statements so far suggest.
The federal government’s position starts from first principles. The Department of Homeland Security has described enforcing immigration law as a “clear federal responsibility” under Article I, Article II and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, as a spokesperson put it in an email to KTVU this year about Oakland’s ICE-free zones. The General Services Administration is the federal government’s landlord: it leases and assigns office space and parking for agencies that need it, and the space it arranged here is next door to the region’s ICE field office. Courts have held that local governments may decline to help with immigration enforcement, but may not regulate the federal government directly or single out those who do business with it. Neither ICE nor the G.S.A. has addressed the garage arrangement publicly in statements reviewed by The Inquirer.
How the spaces were assigned
The arrangement has three layers. The city owns the garage. A private company, IMCO Parking, runs it under contract. IMCO, in turn, made an agreement with the G.S.A. for a portion of the garage, and the G.S.A. assigned those spaces to ICE.
“We are aware that the [General Services Administration] has assigned parking spaces to the Federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency in the SFMTA’s Golden Gateway garage, as it is located on Clay Street in very close proximity to the ICE field office,” Parisa Safarzadeh, the transportation agency’s director of communications, told Mission Local.
Ms. Safarzadeh said the agency knew of its operator’s subcontract with the federal government when it was signed, but that the contract “does not specify which federal agency the GSA assigns to the property.” The agency, she said, is “working with our City Attorney’s Office to explore all options related to our contractual agreement at this time.”
“Any use of city garages to stage ICE enforcement activity is not in line with the SFMTA and city values,” she added. “We are working with IMCO Parking, our parking garage management vendor, to understand and ensure any use of our city garage adheres to our local laws.”
The Inquirer sent the transportation agency’s media relations office written questions on Saturday, asking how many spaces are assigned to federal agencies and under what agreement, approved when and by whom; whether the agency knew the spaces would be used by ICE; the term and revenue of the arrangement; and whether any change is being considered. The agency did not respond to the Inquirer’s request for comment sent Saturday.
What the city’s contract says
The Golden Gateway Garage is one of 12 city parking facilities, known as Group B, that the SFMTA Board of Directors awarded to IMCO Parking LLC in September 2022. Board Resolution 220920-084 approved a management agreement worth up to $180 million over as long as nine years: a five-year base term and two two-year options. IMCO is paid a $10,000 monthly management fee plus reimbursed operating costs; parking revenue belongs to the city. The Board of Supervisors approved the agreement that November, and the operators took over on Feb. 1, 2023. The options can be exercised without returning to the supervisors.
The contract documents in the board packet contain several provisions that bear directly on the present dispute.
The first concerns subcontracting. “Manager is prohibited from subcontracting any of its duties under this Agreement or any part of it unless such subcontracting is first approved by the Director in writing,” the agreement says. “An agreement made by Manager and a subcontractor that is in violation of this provision shall confer no rights on any party and shall be null and void.”
It is not yet clear whether the G.S.A. arrangement falls under that clause at all. A block of reserved spaces for a single customer may be treated as a monthly parking agreement rather than a subcontract of the manager’s duties, and the contract’s facility regulations give the transportation agency’s director the power to set “the maximum number of monthly parking agreements that shall be permitted in a Facility.” Either reading leaves the director with a role. If it is a subcontract, written approval was required. If it is monthly parking, the director controls the volume. Ms. Safarzadeh’s statement that the agency knew of the agreement when it was signed suggests that it was not concealed from the city; whether it was formally approved is one of the questions the agency has not answered.
The second provision is the exit. The agreement gives the city “the option, in its sole discretion, to terminate this Agreement, at any time during the term hereof, for convenience and without cause,” by written notice. That gives the city a remedy over IMCO that does not depend on resolving any question of immigration law.
The third concerns data. The facility regulations bar the operator from releasing license plate data without written authority from the agency’s parking director or a valid court order or subpoena, and say the operator “shall not allow anyone, including law enforcement, to view video camera footage” without a written request tied to an active investigation. Those rules govern the garage’s records, not who may park there, but they will matter if the city or advocates seek to establish how the space has been used.
What the agreement does not contain is any clause about federal tenants or immigration enforcement. It was drafted in 2022, more than three years before San Francisco adopted its ICE-free property law.
The ICE-free ordinance and its grandfather clause
In February, the Board of Supervisors voted 11 to 0 to pass Ordinance 27-26, sponsored by Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, which amended Section 4.19 of the Administrative Code. Mayor Daniel Lurie signed it on Feb. 27, and it took effect 30 days later. The ordinance bars city officials from authorizing uses of city property that would disrupt city operations or discourage access to city services unless the use furthers a city purpose, and it declares that “the use of real or personal property to assist in the enforcement of Federal immigration law is not a City purpose.” It defines that use as the right to occupy or use property exclusively, and authorizes the City Attorney to sue anyone who uses city property for an unlawful or unauthorized purpose.
When the measure was introduced, Mr. Mahmood told KQED that “we can’t blur the lines between local government and federal immigration enforcement.” The ordinance’s findings say it “is not intended to and does not interfere with or obstruct lawful immigration enforcement,” and a separate section says it is not to be applied in conflict with federal or state law.
The ordinance also contains a provision that may prove decisive here. Section 4 says: “Nothing in this ordinance shall be interpreted or applied to affect or interfere with any property interest or agreement, including but not limited to amendments to those agreements, deeds, easements, leases, licenses, or permits … entered into or effective before the effective date of this ordinance.”
If IMCO’s agreement with the G.S.A. was signed before late March 2026, that language would appear to place it outside the ordinance’s reach, even if the ordinance would otherwise cover it. Activists who track enforcement at 630 Sansome Street told Mission Local that agents have worked out of the garage for at least a year, which, if accurate, would put the start of the arrangement before the law took effect. The date of the agreement, which neither the city nor IMCO has made public, is therefore one of the central facts for the City Attorney’s review. That review is pending; the City Attorney’s office has not announced any conclusion.
Mr. Mahmood said he had not known about ICE’s presence in the garage until Mission Local raised it. He told the outlet he is “working with city officials to determine exactly what happened, how this space was used, and whether our laws were violated.”
The older sanctuary law
San Francisco’s original sanctuary measure, the 1989 City and County of Refuge Ordinance in Chapter 12H of the Administrative Code, works differently. It bars city employees and departments from using city funds or resources to assist federal immigration enforcement, unless federal or state law or a court order requires it. Complaints under it go to the Human Rights Commission. California’s own sanctuary law, Senate Bill 54, places similar limits on state and local law enforcement agencies.
Angela Chan, an assistant chief attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office who helped draft some of those laws, told Mission Local the garage arrangement may violate city and state sanctuary laws. “SFMTA is responsible for overseeing city-owned garages and ensuring they are not used to facilitate ICE operations, directly or through private contractors,” Ms. Chan said.
That is the view of the Public Defender’s Office and other advocates; it has not been tested. The question under Chapter 12H would be whether renting spaces to a federal customer, at the rates any customer pays, amounts to the use of city resources to assist enforcement, or whether it is ordinary commercial parking. The city has not said which view it holds.
The federal answer
Federal law supplies the counterweight. In United States v. California, decided in April 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit largely upheld California’s sanctuary law, holding that the state could refuse to devote its own officers to federal immigration enforcement. The same opinion described the limit on that power. Under the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity, which flows from the Supremacy Clause, state laws are invalid if they “regulate[] the United States directly or discriminate[] against the Federal Government or those with whom it deals,” the court wrote, quoting the Supreme Court.
That distinction is likely to frame any next step. Declining to offer new space to ICE is the kind of nonparticipation the Ninth Circuit has allowed. Canceling an existing agreement with a federal tenant, or directing a contractor to treat a federal customer differently from other monthly parkers, could invite a claim that the city is discriminating against the federal government or a party it deals with. The termination-for-convenience clause runs between the city and IMCO, not the G.S.A., which may give the city more room, but how a court would see it has not been tested.
The Trump administration has made clear it regards local efforts to wall off property from immigration agents as unlawful. When Oakland issued its own ICE-free order this year, a D.H.S. spokesperson told KTVU the move was “legally illiterate,” and said that “our brave law enforcement will continue to risk their lives to arrest these heinous criminals and make California safe again.” Chicago’s mayor has issued a similar executive order, and cities including Ann Arbor, Mich., have barred the use of municipal lots as staging areas.
What the garage has been used for
The central factual question, what the federal vehicles in the garage have been used for, remains unresolved. Mission Local reported that when its reporters visited on Friday afternoon, no ICE officers or other federal officials were present. It said video of an October 2025 arrest outside the Concord Immigration Court showed a blue Nissan SUV used by ICE bearing the same license plate as a vehicle parked in the garage. Activists told the outlet they had seen uniformed agents inside the lot and a vehicle involved in a recent Oakland arrest leaving it. The Inquirer has not independently verified those accounts.
The field office at 630 Sansome Street, the federal building known for decades as the Appraisers Building, was the scene of repeated arrests and protests last year, including a July 2025 confrontation in which, Mission Local reported, an ICE SUV drove through a crowd of protesters. Parking near a federal office for its own vehicles is a routine government need, and the G.S.A. arranges such space for agencies across the country. Whether that need, met in a city garage, counts as staging enforcement under San Francisco law is what the city now has to decide.
What comes next
The transportation agency’s statements point toward three options: amending IMCO’s agreement, asking IMCO to end or decline to renew the G.S.A. arrangement, or leaving it in place on the strength of the ordinance’s grandfather clause. The City Attorney’s review will determine which the city believes it can lawfully pursue.
Several questions remain open. They include when the G.S.A. agreement was signed and for how long; how many spaces it covers and what the federal government pays; whether the director approved it in writing; and whether any city employee has had a role in the enforcement activity that Chapter 12H restricts. The answers will determine what happens at 250 Clay Street, and whether any of the city’s other garages carry similar arrangements.
Celia Marroquín covers San Francisco City Hall, the Board of Supervisors, city departments and the neighborhoods where their decisions land, for the Inquirer’s City Desk. More from Celia Marroquín
