Leandro Oliveira Xavier, a Brazilian percussionist who drums and teaches with the Oakland cultural group SambaFunk!, has been held at Mesa Verde in Bakersfield since a December ICE check-in in San Francisco. His circle is running a "Free Leo, Free Them All" campaign.

On Dec. 4, 2025, Leandro Oliveira Xavier walked into what he expected to be a routine immigration check-in in San Francisco. He didn't walk back out.

Xavier — a Brazilian percussionist from Salvador, Bahia, who drums and teaches with the Oakland cultural organization SambaFunk! and plays lead percussion for the Afro-Brazilian band Namorados da Lua — was arrested by immigration agents and taken to ICE's Mesa Verde Detention Center in Bakersfield, where, The Oaklandside reports, he has now been held for more than eight months.

He had moved to the United States the year before, applied for asylum, and kept every appointment while he waited to argue his case, according to The Oaklandside's Aug. 4 account. His detention at a scheduled check-in fits a pattern advocates describe as targeting the people doing everything by the book. "They're going after people who are easy to pick up," Lisa Knox of the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice told the outlet.

The legal ground has been shifting under cases like his. In June, U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California ordered ICE to stop making arrests inside immigration courts nationwide — a ruling The Dissent reported at the time, driven by a class-action suit from Bay Area civil rights attorneys. Xavier was picked up at a check-in, not a courtroom, and remains detained.

Now his Oakland circle is organizing. Close friend Colin Andrew Logan, who has known Xavier since 2002, launched a "Free Leo, Free Them All" GoFundMe in February and is raising toward a bond, The Oaklandside reports. On Monday, SambaFunk members and local organizations rallied outside ICE's San Francisco field office demanding his release.

ICE told The Oaklandside it would answer questions only if given Xavier's Alien Registration Number; his family declined, and the agency has said nothing about why he was detained. He remains in Bakersfield.