When ICE arrested Alberto at a scheduled immigration appointment in Fresno last fall, he had spent years working undercover for the federal agency's predecessor — collecting names of undocumented farmworkers across the Central Valley in exchange for temporary work permits and the standing promise of a green card that never came. San Francisco has committed roughly $18 million to immigrant legal defense this year. None of it was built for him.

Alberto's case — reported by Mission Local — exposes a gap at the center of San Francisco's otherwise robust immigrant defense apparatus: the city's legal aid infrastructure was designed for immigrants facing removal, not for former government cooperators whose informal arrangements with federal agents left them undocumented and unprotected for decades. As the Trump administration's deportation machine sweeps up people long thought to be safe, that gap is no longer theoretical.

Alberto remembers his arrival in the United States in 1990 precisely. "I was really skinny, and I could run," the now-59-year-old told Mission Local, describing how he sprinted across the border from Tijuana to San Ysidro while his wife and two infant sons were smuggled across separately in a coyote's car.

What he could not outrun, three decades later, was ICE.

Alberto — a pseudonym Mission Local is using to protect his identity — spent roughly four years in the early 1990s working as a confidential informant for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to ICE. He worked short stints at Central Valley farms from Sanger to Dinuba to Three Rivers, collecting the names of undocumented field workers and the ranchers who employed them. His compensation was informal: temporary work permits and the standing promise of a green card. Mission Local reviewed copies of those permits.

"I understood I would be protected," he told Mission Local. But he wasn't.

In October, Alberto was arrested by ICE at a green card interview he had finally arranged after years without any formal immigration status. He was released, then re-arrested a month later at another scheduled appointment in Fresno — court documents confirm both arrests. He was held in an ICE detention facility near Bakersfield for close to four months.

In the intervening decades, Alberto had built a life: he became a surgical technician, bought a home in Fresno, and paid taxes. His INS supervisor, he told Mission Local, had informally arranged with the hospital that employed him as a housekeeper to allow periodic time off to continue undercover farm assignments. Mission Local was not able to independently verify that arrangement.

When Alberto pressed his INS boss for the promised green card — after delivering what he described as the identity of a "really dangerous" ringleader — he remembered the boss laughing before saying, "Let me see what I can do." What he did was renew Alberto's temporary status. Three decades later, that status had long lapsed.

Alberto's case sits outside the boundaries of what San Francisco's substantial legal defense network was built to handle. The city has committed roughly $18 million to immigrant legal services in the current fiscal year. Mayor Daniel Lurie maintained those allocations despite a projected $600 million budget shortfall, and the Board of Supervisors appropriated an additional $3.5 million in supplemental funding as the Trump administration's deportation campaign intensified, according to Mission Local's May 2026 reporting on San Francisco's immigration budget.

San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju has expanded his office's Immigration Defense Unit — bolstered by a $3.4 million Crankstart Foundation grant adding three attorneys and a legal assistant through 2029 — and has publicly condemned ICE enforcement tactics that he says undermine due process. But that infrastructure was designed primarily for immigrants facing removal without prior government entanglement.

Former confidential informants like Alberto, whose arrangements with federal agents were informal, undocumented, and ultimately unenforceable, occupy a legal category that neither city services nor immigration law addresses cleanly. They cooperated with the very enforcement apparatus that is now detaining them, under promises that were never put in writing and never kept.

Alberto has since been released from detention, Mission Local reported. His immigration case remains unresolved.