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On Thursday, after a phone call to Mayor Daniel Lurie reportedly arranged after a concerted lobbying effort by tech executives, President Donald Trump “called off” a planned immigration “surge” in San Francisco. Federal officials confirmed on Friday that the rest of the Bay Area would also be spared.
That respite may not be forever. President Trump wrote in his post announcing the pullback that he and Lurie had spoken about the mayor’s efforts to address crime and that he was told Lurie is “making substantial progress.” The president will “give him a chance,” he wrote, before ending with his characteristic: “Stay tuned!”
If the feds do come back to the Bay Area, San Francisco may not be their first target.
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Other Bay Area cities are home to much larger populations of undocumented immigrants, according to data from the think tank Migration Policy Institute.
While San Francisco is home to about 42,000 undocumented residents, Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose and Sunnyvale, is home to more than double that number, 119,000.
Alameda County, which includes Oakland, Berkeley and Fremont, is home to 103,000 undocumented residents. Contra Costa and San Mateo counties both also have larger undocumented populations at 68,000 and 56,000 respectively.
San Francisco has only 9.5 percent of the undocumented migrants in the seven Bay Area counties for which the data is available.
The same trend follows for the number of immigrants overall. According to 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, some 811,000 foreign-born residents live in Santa Clara County and 584,000 in Alameda County. Meanwhile, around 283,000 live in San Francisco. In those three counties, 19 to 22 percent of foreign-born residents are naturalized U.S. citizens.
While San Francisco may have a small overall share of all the immigrants living in the Bay Area, immigrants still make up a large portion of the city’s residents.
Undocumented immigrants are an estimated five percent of the city’s population, and foreign-born residents account for over a third at 34 percent.
We’re more than halfway there!
We’ve raised 2/3 of our $300,000 goal to cover immigration for the next three years of Trump’s term! More than 500 of you have stepped up since September — an incredible feat of community support.
We are humbled. We still have a bit to go: Donate below if you want to keep Mission Local in the courts, reporting on ICE’s actions in San Francisco.