California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he was prepared to sue the Trump administration in a “nanosecond” if the White House moved forward with the deployment of the National Guard to San Francisco.
“Quite literally, this is the lawsuit that I will file within a nanosecond of any efforts to send the military to one of America’s great cities,” he added during a press briefing, while holding up a copy of the legal documents.
Newsom’s statement comes as the Trump administration is preparing to dispatch more than 100 federal agents to the San Francisco Bay Area this week as it ratchets up immigration enforcement in the region, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
These agents will include personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and are expected to begin arriving as of Thursday.
The administration has similarly surged federal agents in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles, where they’ve engaged in violent raids of apartment buildings and workplaces as well as brutal arrests.
Newsom warned Wednesday that Trump’s “authoritarian playbook” often involved sending agents to cause chaos, and then using that dynamic to justify the deployment of National Guard troops.
“He sends out masked men. He sends out border patrol. He sends out ICE,” Newsom said in a video post on X on Wednesday. “[He] creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving for that by sending in the Guard in the first place. This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”
“I think they want us in San Francisco. San Francisco was truly one of the great cities of the world, and then 15 years ago, it went wrong, it went woke,” Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday while discussing the deployment of the National Guard.
Local leaders, meanwhile, have stressed that troops aren’t needed and emphasized that the National Guard isn’t equipped to address issues like a drug crisis.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, meanwhile, emphasized that the presence of federal agents would only spur anxiety and fear.
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