Oakland Mayor and former Congresswoman Barbara Lee never had the pleasure of a phone call from President Trump on Wednesday. But she now says that she has otherwise been able to confirm that no immigration-arrest “surges” are happening in the Bay Area, full stop.
On Thursday it remained an open question whether the already deployed US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in Alameda would be put to work on immigration raids outside of San Francisco proper. And City of Oakland officials, including Mayor Barbara Lee, were on alert, expecting that some type of immigration “surge” as President Trump described, or some appearance by CBP agents at East Bay locations, potentially provoking protests, could occur by Friday or Saturday.
But on Friday, Mayor Lee released a statement saying, “I spoke with Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez, who confirmed through her communications with ICE that Border Patrol operations are cancelled for the greater Bay Area — which includes Oakland — at this time.”
At 1:45 pm Friday, Lee has scheduled a news conference to discuss this, as well as a shooting that left two people injured near the gates of Coast Guard Island last night, following a day of protest there.
“I am aware of last night’s shooting near the entrance of Coast Guard Island in Alameda,” Lee said in her statement. “The Oakland Police Department is assisting the Alameda Police Department in securing the perimeter of the scene. The FBI is the lead agency investigating the incident, and I will continue to gather available information as it becomes accessible.”
The “peace deal” between President Trump and the City of San Francisco was apparently brokered among billionaire business leaders (and billionaire heir Daniel Lurie) late Wednesday night, and had Trump completely changing his tune about the city in comments to cabinet members on Thursday.
Both Trump and Lurie confirmed that a “surge” of federal immigration agents had been called off “in San Francisco,” with Trump giving Lurie the benefit of the doubt that crime was coming under control in the city — Trump, naturally, conflating immigration and crime. But neither man said anything about the rest of the Bay Area, and perhaps this was just because Trump isn’t particularly aware of the rest of the Bay Area, and he knows that it’s mostly only talk of “San Francisco” that plays to his base.
Oakland, meanwhile, was left to wonder what could come next.
As Mayor Barbara Lee said in a statement Thursday, “I have not received any communication from the White House or the Department of Homeland Security regarding federal operations in Oakland, however, I am in touch with the Governor’s Office and our federal delegation.”
Governor Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, expressed some healthy skepticism about taking Trump at his word on Thursday.
“I’m not thinking for a second that this is the end of this in California — quite the contrary,” Newsom said at a news conference about Prop 50. “This guy’s just winding up. Watch ICE, not just the National Guard. Watch what’s going on with your own eyes all across this country. This guy is a chaos president.”
Newsom added, “If you think this story just ended — that it’s got a period or exclamation point — you know better.”
Newsom further expressed some disgust about how the surge was called off, saying, “Business leaders made the phone call to Donald Trump — now we know who he listens to. In every way, it’s not surprising because it’s so consistent with who Trump is — how broken his mind is — that it would take business leaders to make those calls, not the people he should be representing.”
Previously: Trump and Lurie Have Their Moment as Oakland Braces For Its Own Possible Federal ‘Surge’