The White House will spare the rest of the Bay Area from planned deportation raids, capping days of anxiety after the Department of Homeland Security first announced earlier this week it would “surge” San Francisco with 100 agents from Customs and Border Protection.
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said Friday that Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez informed her that DHS had canceled CBP raids for the greater Bay Area. Her announcement came one day after Lee’s San Francisco counterpart, Daniel Lurie, said President Donald Trump told him in a late night phone call that he was calling off similar raids after personal entreaties from tech moguls Jensen Huang (Nvidia) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce).
A spokesperson for Lee did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Sgt. Roberto Morales, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told Sanchez on Thursday afternoon that “all Border Patrol operations in the greater Bay Area are currently suspended.”
After Trump spoke to Lurie, local leaders and advocates worried that Trump would shift his attention from San Francisco, which at one point hosted more billionaires than any other city, to less powerful and more diverse enclaves like Oakland and Alameda.
Lee said she did not receive a phone call from the president, unlike Lurie, a political moderate and heir to the Levi Strauss denim fortune who was elected to public office for the first time earlier this year. Contrary to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has taken to antagonizing Trump online, Lurie has tread carefully. Until this week, he avoided mentioning Trump’s name and tapped business and tech allies like Benioff, OpenAI executive Sam Altman and venture capitalist Ron Conway to intervene on his behalf.
Lurie told reporters on Thursday morning that he “did not ask for anybody to call” Trump nor did he make any concessions other than agreeing to meet with Attorney General Pam Bondi about partnering with federal law enforcement to crack down on local drug trafficking.
The Bay Area is the first liberal region to successfully dissuade the White House from sending immigration agents after Trump said he would send federal troops to liberal cities like Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago to punish them.
Protesters continued to clashed with law enforcement early Friday morning on Coast Guard Island in Alameda County, where CBP was supposed to stage before launching its Bay Area raids.
The Coast Guard said that around 10 p.m. Thursday, the driver of a U-Haul truck tried to ram the main gate to the base, “ignored commands and posed a threat,” forcing officers to fire at the truck.
No officers were injured, and the FBI is investigating, according to a Coast Guard spokesperson.