The Trump administration appeared poised on Wednesday to send dozens of federal agents to the San Francisco Bay Area for a major immigration enforcement operation, prompting condemnation from California leaders.
Details of the deployment were still emerging, but it will reportedly involve more than 100 federal agents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The agents are reportedly set to begin using the US Coast Guard base in Alameda, a city located across the bay from San Francisco. It remained unclear whether national guard troops would also be involved.
The deployment follows weeks of threats by Donald Trump to target the Democratic-run city. California’s governor Gavin Newsom criticised the move, calling it “right out of the dictator’s handbook”.
“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 for that by sending in the [national] guard,” Newsom said in a video statement. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”
Mia Bonta, the state assembly member who represents Alameda, denounced the arrival of federal agents in her district as “authoritarian theatrics”.
“This is against our values as Alamedans to have our city used as a staging ground to inflict fear, terror, and state-sponsored violence across the Bay.”
San Francisco is the latest major city targeted by Donald Trump’s campaign of mass immigration arrests. The deployment is expected to trigger a showdown between the administration and local leaders who have pledged to block militarized immigration enforcement in the city.
San Franciscans have been readying for months for Trump to make good on repeated threats to send troops to the city. At a Wednesday afternoon press conference, San Francisco’s mayor Daniel Lurie reiterated that the city was prepared.
“For months, we have been anticipating the possibility of some kind of federal deployment in our city,” said Lurie, adding that he had taken further executive actions on Wednesday to “strengthen the city’s support for our immigrant communities, and ensure our departments are coordinated ahead of any federal deployment.”
Related: Trump claims ‘unquestioned power’ in vow to send troops to San Francisco
Despite legal challenges to deployments in a number of cities, including Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles, Trump has claimed “unquestioned power” to deploy the national guard in cities, citing the Insurrection Act which allows presidents limited power to deploy troops on US soil.
Newsom – who previously served as San Francisco’s mayor – had pledged to intervene “immediately” to a deployment in the city. “The notion that the federal government can deploy troops into our cities with no justification grounded in reality, no oversight, no accountability, no respect for state sovereignty – it’s a direct assault on the rule of law,” he said on Wednesday.
Community groups, including Bay Resistance – a social justice nonprofit created during the first Trump administration – have prepped quickly mobilize a mass rally in the city, as well vigils at local libraries.
In San Francisco’s Mission district, a predominantly Latino community, city supervisor Jackie Fielder told reporters last week she and her constituents had been bracing for this moment.
“The moment that people stop going to work, when anyone Black or brown can’t freely walk outside without the fear of Trump’s federal agents racially profiling and arresting them, the moment when parents stop sending kids to school, become too afraid to go to the grocery store or doctor,” Fielder said. “What we have been preparing for in the Mission is essentially a shutdown the likes of which we haven’t seen since Covid.”
About 300 out of 4,000 California national guard troops remain federalized under an order from Trump. About 200 of them had been sent to Oregon, where they were waiting in limbo amid a legal battle over their deployment.
This week, Newsom said he had called the California national guard troops under his control to staff food banks amid the government shutdown.
