President Donald Trump and the specter of a federal crackdown loomed over San Francisco throughout 2025, but aside from a few panicked moments, the city avoided a head-on collision with the MAGA crowd, thanks to phone calls from tech titans, lawsuits, and strategic near-silence from the city’s chief executive.
That’s not to say San Francisco was unaffected by the first year of Trump’s second term. But despite repeated warnings that federal forces were heading in, San Francisco did not become a battleground like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Whether through skill, connections, or fortune, San Francisco consumed presidential attention but avoided presidential action.
“Over the last year, the federal administration has unjustly targeted many American communities, cities, and states,” City Attorney David Chiu told The Standard. “We do not relish filing lawsuits against the federal administration, but we must do so to protect San Francisco’s residents, policies, and funding. Thus far, our legal efforts have safeguarded key San Francisco policies and preserved billions of dollars in federal funding.”
Radio station on notice
The Trump administration tangled this year with media heavyweights like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and talk-show hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Fallon. Closer to home, the Federal Communications Commission went after San Francisco’s news radio station.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr called out KCBS’ reporting on the movements of undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents around the Bay Area. In a Jan. 26 broadcast, anchor Bret Burkhart said San Jose Mayor Mahan and Councilmember Pete Ortiz were confirming actions by ICE agents in that city, before quoting a local rapid-response network’s descriptions of federal vehicles and reporting sightings of agents outside a residence and a Target store.
Carr told a Fox News host (opens in new tab) on Feb. 6 that the agency’s enforcement bureau had sent a letter of inquiry about whether the broadcast violated the terms of KCBS’ license.
Cuts, closures
As the administration slashed federal spending across the country, programs and organizations in San Francisco were caught in the downsizing. Cuts to federal agencies boded poorly for the city’s Museum of the African Diaspora, as well as for nonprofits addressing the housing crisis. Not long after the General Services Administration announced its intent to sell downtown office buildings — including one named for Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — the city attorney’s office joined a lawsuit against the Department of Government Efficiency’s mass firings of thousands of government employees.
Dissolve the Presidio
Trump’s campaign to dismantle and shake up San Francisco began in earnest Feb. 12, when he signed an executive order calling for the dissolution of the Presidio Trust, the federal agency that manages the former military base turned national park.
The order called the trust “wasteful” and proposed transferring the 1,500-acre site, which draws 9.5 million visitors per year, to the Department of the Interior for “better use,” leaving businesses and workers baffled. The trust’s leadership pushed back directly, noting that the park is financially self-sufficient.
Trump’s order also drew notice from a Native tribe that petitioned the federal government for custody of the site, and calls for its designation as a “freedom city” undoubtedly inspired (opens in new tab) other calls for repurposing of former federal land. A Presidio rep declined to comment on the park’s eventful year.
Reopen Alcatraz?
If the idea of getting rid of the Presidio ruffled feathers, people absolutely lost their minds when Trump suggested it was time to reopen a high-security prison on Alcatraz Island.
In May, just hours after a South Florida PBS television station aired a certain Clint Eastwood film (opens in new tab), Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
It seemed like a joke or a passing thought, because Alcatraz is, of course, a national park, and running a prison there decades ago was expensive. But in a choreographed visit to the decrepit redoubt in July, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Attorney General Pam Bondi touted plans to convert it. Rep. Nancy Pelosi called the suggestion “the Trump administration’s stupidest initiative yet,” and state Sen. Scott Wiener compared the idea to “basically lighting taxpayer dollars on fire.”
The crackdown that wasn’t
Immigrants have been detained while showing up for routine court hearings and check-ins in the Bay Area. Opponents of the president’s immigration policy have engaged in large demonstrations that have resulted in arrests. But after so much bluster, Trump hasn’t pounced.
“Look at what Democrats have done to San Francisco,” Trump said in a White House speech Aug. 22. “They’ve destroyed it. We could clean that up too. We’ll clean that one up too.”
“But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places,” Trump told (opens in new tab) an audience of military officials gathered Sept. 30 at Quantico, Virginia. “And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too; it’s a war from within.”
The president’s call for a crackdown came against a growing regional disquiet over federal enforcement visibility that included the June deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles and an uptick in arrests and attendant protests at immigration processing locations in downtown San Francisco.
Mayor Daniel Lurie refrained from picking a fight. “Crime in San Francisco is down 30%; it’s down 40% in our financial district,” Lurie said at a press conference the day of Trump’s military address. “That’s what I can control.”
On Oct. 10, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told The New York Times (opens in new tab) that he welcomed the idea of National Guard members coming to the city and, noting the shortage of 1,000 San Francisco Police Department officers, said, “if they can be cops, I’m all for it.” In an interview with The Standard a day later, Benioff took umbrage over accusations that he had effectively distanced himself from the city, while observers expressed either scorn or steely neutrality at his call’s impacts. (opens in new tab)
Trump repeated his interest in sending authorities to San Francisco at an Oct. 15 press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel. In a Fox News TV appearance (opens in new tab) a few days later, he said San Francisco was “truly one of the great cities of the world, and then 15 years ago it went wrong — it went woke. We are gonna go to San Francisco, and we are going to make it great.”
On Oct. 22, reports emerged of a ramp-up of Customs and Border Protection agents tasked with immigration enforcement duties at Coast Guard Island, an artificial island in the Oakland estuary. The next day, agents used pepper balls and flash-bang grenades while trying to disperse hundreds of protesters who filled an intersection at the causeway leading to the island. One protester attempted to back a rented truck onto the causeway, drawing gunfire from Coast Guard and charges from federal prosecutors.
But last-minute negotiations, including conversations with Lurie, Benioff and Nvidia CEO (and city arts patron) Jensen Huang, led Trump to cancel the surge.
“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 said in a Truth Social post (opens in new tab). “They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”