Trump says he’s called off ICE operations in San Francisco after talking to tech leaders
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- President Trump called off the deployment of immigration agents in San Francisco at the behest of the mayor and tech leaders.
- Gov. Newsom had said the deployment was deliberately designed to create chaos so that the president could then send in the National Guard.
President Trump said Thursday he had called off a planned deployment of immigration agents in San Francisco after prominent tech executives and Mayor Daniel Lurie asked him to do so.
“The Federal Government was preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday, but friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Among the people Trump said he spoke to were Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Lurie released a statement saying he had talked to Trump on Wednesday night and told him that the presence of militarized immigration enforcement would hinder ongoing efforts to decrease crime and fentantyl use and boost economic activity.
“In that conversation, the president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco,” Lurie said.
On Truth Social, Trump said he believed the surge would be a “faster, stronger and safer” way to remove criminals from the city but that Lurie asked “very nicely” if he could be given a chance to “turn it around.”
News of the planned deployment of federal agents prompted fierce backlash from some California officials Wednesday.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a statement on X confirming and criticizing the agents’ upcoming arrival. He called deployment a “page right out of the dictator’s handbook” intended to create the conditions of unrest necessary to then send in the National Guard.
“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving that by sending in the [National] Guard,” Newsom said. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”
President Trump’s suggestion that he will soon send federal forces into San Francisco was met with outrage and eye-rolls from local residents and leaders, who called it unnecessary.
About 100 federal agents, including members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, were en route to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Alameda base, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle. On Thursday morning, before Trump announced the cancellation of the surge, protesters gathered outside the base, where they attempted to prevent federal agents from entering, the Chronicle reported.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that agents would be performing immigration enforcement in San Francisco.
“DHS is targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists — in cities such as Portland, Chicago, Memphis and San Francisco,” the spokesperson said.
Lurie, who has thus far avoided directly criticizing Trump during the mayor’s first 10 months in office, issued a statement Wednesday outlining his strong opposition to a deployment of immigration agents or the National Guard in San Francisco.
“Uncoordinated federal action undermines our work,” he said. “Having the military posted in front of our schools, restaurants and office buildings will hinder our progress and let chaos get in the way of our recovery.”
Newsom told reporters at a Wednesday event that the state would file a lawsuit within a “nanosecond of any efforts to send the military to one of America’s great cities, San Francisco.”
He urged Californians to remain peaceful in the face of the arrival of federal agents.
“President Trump and [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller’s authoritarian playbook is coming for another of our cities, and violence and vandalism are exactly what they’re looking for to invoke chaos,” said Newsom on X.
Trump had suggested for weeks that San Francisco was next on his list for National Guard deployment, after the administration sent troops to Los Angeles and Chicago and was battling in court to send them to Portland, Ore.
On Sunday, Trump told Fox News, “We’re going to San Francisco and we’ll make it great. It’ll be great again.”
Trump had suggested that the role of the National Guard in San Francisco would be to address crime rates. However, the National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.
“I want to make sure that San Franciscans understand that the National Guard would not have any legal authority to make arrests or investigate crime,” San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins told NBC Bay Area on Tuesday. She said the Guard is not legally equipped to “to curb the fentanyl crisis or retail theft or the issues that are most pressing here.”
Lurie acknowledged Wednesday that the city had more work to do to combat fentanyl use but said that the National Guard “cannot arrest drug dealers or shut down open-air drug markets.” He also touted progress the city had made in reducing violent crime to 70-year lows and the number of tent encampments to record lows.
Last month, Trump said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”
Trump said he told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our National Guard.”
In a Monday statement, the White House defended the deployment of troops in U.S. cities, pointing to drops in crime after troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C.
“The President’s actions in DC have been tremendously successful, with even Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser highlighting the significant reduction in crime as a result of the operation,” Abigail Jackson, White House spokesperson, said in the statement. “San Francisco Democrats should look at the tremendous results in DC and Memphis and listen to fellow Democrat Mayor Bowser and welcome the President in to clean up their city.”
The president has direct command of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., as it is a federal territory. However, the president is generally not allowed to federalize troops to support local law enforcement without a governor’s consent.
In the case of Los Angeles and Chicago, the Guard was mobilized to defend federal property and personnel during immigration protests. In Memphis, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has approved the deployment of the Guard to assist law enforcement with a crackdown on crime. Memphis has the highest violent-crime rate of any city in America, according to FBI data.
Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, said Wednesday that the City by the Bay is experiencing its lowest homicide rate in 60 years.
“It’s one of the safest large cities in this country that’s experiencing an economic rebirth and growth,” Newsom said.
Times staff writers Salvador Hernandez and Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.
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