Trump says he's called off ICE operations in San Francisco

President Donald Trump said Thursday he’s called off an expected deployment of immigration agents in San Francisco.

“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 with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Lurie released a statement saying he had talked to Trump on Wednesday night.

“In that conversation, the president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco,” he said.

The threat of a deployment had sparked concerns by some California officials.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a statement on X confirming and criticizing the agents’ upcoming arrival. He called deployment a “page right out of the dictator’s handbook” intended to create the conditions of unrest necessary to then send in the National Guard.

“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving that by sending in the (National) Guard,” Newsom said. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”

About 100 federal agents, including members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are en route to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Alameda base, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that agents would be performing immigration enforcement in San Francisco.

“DHS is targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists — in cities such as Portland, Chicago, Memphis and San Francisco,” the spokesperson said. The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to the Los Angeles Times’ request for comment.

Newsom told reporters at a Wednesday event that the state would file a lawsuit within a “nanosecond of any efforts to send the military to one of America’s great cities, San Francisco.”

He urged Californians to remain peaceful in the face of the arrival of federal agents.

“President Trump and (White House deputy chief of staff) Stephen Miller’s authoritarian playbook is coming for another of our cities, and violence and vandalism are exactly what they’re looking for to invoke chaos,” said Newsom on X.

Trump has suggested for weeks that San Francisco is next on his list for National Guard deployment, after the administration sent troops to Los Angeles and Chicago and is battling in court to send them to Portland, Oregon.

On Sunday, Trump told Fox News, “We’re going to San Francisco and we’ll make it great. It’ll be great again.”

Trump has suggested that the role of the National Guard in San Francisco would be to address crime rates. However, the National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

“I want to make sure that San Franciscans understand that the National Guard would not have any legal authority to make arrests or investigate crime,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told NBC Bay Area on Tuesday. She said the Guard is not legally equipped to “to curb the fentanyl crisis or retail theft or the issues that are most pressing here.”

Lurie acknowledged that the city has more work to do to combat fentanyl use but said that the National Guard “cannot arrest drug dealers or shut down open-air drug markets.”

Last month, Trump said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

Trump said he told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our National Guard.”

In a Monday statement, the White House defended the deployment of troops in U.S. cities, pointing to drops in crime after troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C.

“The President’s actions in D.C. have been tremendously successful, with even Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser highlighting the significant reduction in crime as a result of the operation,” Abigail Jackson, White House spokesperson, said in the statement. “San Francisco Democrats should look at the tremendous results in D.C. and Memphis and listen to fellow Democrat Mayor Bowser and welcome the President in to clean up their city.”

The president has direct command of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., as it is a federal territory. However, the president is generally not allowed to federalize troops to support local law enforcement without a governor’s consent.

In the case of Los Angeles and Chicago, the Guard was mobilized to defend federal property and personnel during immigration protests. In Memphis, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has approved the deployment of the Guard to assist law enforcement with a crackdown on crime. Memphis has the highest violent-crime rate of any city in America, according to FBI data.

Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, said Wednesday that the City by the Bay is experiencing its lowest homicide rate in 60 years.

“It’s one of the safest large cities in this country that’s experiencing an economic rebirth and growth,” Newsom said. “We will push back with clarity and conviction and we’ll continue to win in court.”

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(Los Angeles Times staff writers Salvador Hernandez and Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.)

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