Nikolas De Bremaeker, a managing attorney at Oakland's Centro Legal de la Raza who has fought ICE authority in federal court, says he was subjected to a 45-minute search at SFO this month and told he is on a government watchlist — raising alarm among civil liberties advocates about the targeting of immigration lawyers.

The incident, reported by NBC Bay Area, adds a local face to a national pattern that law professors and advocates say is becoming harder to dismiss: that the Trump administration is using the machinery of federal security screening to discourage attorneys from representing immigrant clients and challenging enforcement agencies in court.

Nikolas De Bremaeker was heading to Boston on a flight out of San Francisco International Airport earlier this month when his boarding pass flagged him for enhanced screening. He initially assumed it was random — the kind of inconvenience any traveler might shrug off.

It was not random. A Transportation Security Administration officer told him so directly, after roughly six TSA workers spent 45 minutes turning on his electronic devices, combing through his bags, and subjecting him to what he described to NBC Bay Area as "the most extreme pat-down of my life." When the screening was over, De Bremaeker asked point-blank whether he had been randomly selected. The answer: he was on a watchlist.

"When I was in front of the TSA booth, the TSA worker made a sort of surprised face when scanning my ticket," De Bremaeker told NBC Bay Area. "At that point, the whole interaction became tense. I definitely felt like I was treated like a suspect from that moment on."

De Bremaeker is managing attorney for the immigrants' rights practice at Centro Legal de la Raza, an Oakland-based legal organization that has served Bay Area immigrant communities since 1969. He is, by any measure, the kind of attorney the federal government has clashed with repeatedly in recent months. He has been a vocal critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and NBC Bay Area reported that he recently played a role in a significant court ruling restricting ICE's authority to make arrests at courthouse entrances — the type of enforcement tactic that a federal judge in San Francisco has since banned nationwide through a class-action case brought by Bay Area civil rights attorneys.

During the search at SFO, De Bremaeker made a deliberate choice: he disabled his phone's fingerprint sensor to shield confidential client files from agents who were powering on his devices. The move underscores a concern that goes beyond his personal experience — that enhanced screening of immigration attorneys has the practical effect of exposing privileged communications between lawyers and the often-undocumented clients they represent.

"I was definitely concerned given the work I do, but they wouldn't give me any more information as to the reason why," De Bremaeker said.

A Freedom of Information Act request has been filed on his behalf to determine how he ended up on the watchlist and under what authority. The Department of Homeland Security and TSA did not respond to comment requests from NBC Bay Area.

Bill Hing, a professor of law and migration studies at the University of San Francisco, told NBC Bay Area that what happened to De Bremaeker fits a recognizable template.

"I do think that targeting immigrants' rights attorneys is one of many strategies where the Trump administration is trying to intimidate allies of noncitizens," Hing said. "So, targeting immigration attorneys is definitely what we are seeing here."

For De Bremaeker, the experience raised questions he cannot yet answer. He cannot confirm why his name is on a watchlist or who put it there. But the timing — coming as Bay Area immigration attorneys rack up courtroom wins against ICE enforcement overreach — is not lost on him.

"At that point, all kinds of things went through my head," he said.

The FOIA request may eventually surface documentation. Until then, De Bremaeker joins a small but growing list of advocates, attorneys, and legal observers who say the federal government's security apparatus is functioning less like a neutral screening tool and more like a political instrument — one that sweeps up people not for what they've done, but for who they've defended.

The TSA has not commented publicly on watchlist criteria or how individuals are added to enhanced screening programs.