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.
“Send troops to San Francisco and we will sue you,@realDonaldTrump,” Newsom wrote plainly in a post on X.
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“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.Â
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.Â
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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.Â
“He sends out masked men. He sends out border patrol. He sends out ICE,” Newsom said in a video post on Xon 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.”
The administration’s targeting of the city follows numerous statements Trump has made claiming that San Francisco is crime-ridden and too “woke” even as its violent crime rates have seen major declines.
“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.Â
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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.Â
A DHS spokesperson claimed that federal agents would be targeting the “worst of the worst” as part of enforcement efforts, even though data shows that many of the immigrants detained by the administration have no criminal record.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, meanwhile, emphasized that the presence of federal agents would only spur anxiety and fear.
“This doesn’t make our city safer,” Lurie said in a Wednesday press briefing. “It terrorizes our communities.”
