A protester holds a “Abolish ICE” sign at the No Kings Day rally in Palo Alto on June 14. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney.
President Donald Trump on Thursday confirmed that he called off a planned “surge” of federal agents in San Francisco for this weekend after talking to the city’s mayor and top Silicon Valley tech officials.
Trump last week had called for the National Guard and federal agents to go to San Francisco for increased immigration enforcement and to quell a crime wave that local officials said doesn’t exist.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and other city officials on Wednesday held a briefing amid reports that the federal deployment was imminent, and a large group of protesters gathered early Thursday morning to try to block the entrance to Coast Guard Island in Alameda so federal agents could not gather there for a potential deployment.
Later Thursday morning, Lurie announced he had talked to Trump, who agreed to call off the deployment for the time being, and Trump on his social media platform Truth Social confirmed that was the case.
“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,” Trump wrote. “I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around. I told him I think he is making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove.”
Trump wrote that tech leaders such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also “have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”
Protests were still planned around the Bay Area on Thursday, including one outside of San Francisco City Hall at noon.
Some of the protesters who gathered to block Coast Guard Island earlier Thursday remained there later in the morning and welcomed the news that San Francisco was not facing an imminent deployment of federal agents, but remained wary about the status of other cities.
Along with increased enforcement nationwide from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, since taking office, Trump has ordered National Guard troops from various states to Portland, Oregon; Chicago; Memphis, Tennessee; Washington, D.C.; and Los Angeles. He has said the soldiers are needed to stop rampant crime and civil unrest.
“(The statement) only says San Francisco. So we want to continue to be out here, because we don’t know what this means for Alameda County,” said the Rev. Deborah Lee, co-executive director of the organization Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity.
“We don’t know what this means for the rest of the Bay Area. We also know that every day, ICE is arresting and detaining people, detaining people in their homes, in their workplaces, in the courts. So we know that ICE is not totally going away, but we hope that the federal invasion goes away,” Lee said.
This story was written by Andres Jimenez Larios and Dan McMenamin for Bay City News Service.
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