The Trump administration is temporarily holding off on launching a long-threatened federal crackdown on San Francisco, the president wrote on Truth Social on Thursday, even as immigration agents massed at a Coast Guard base just outside the city in anticipation of the planned surge.
“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.
“I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around,” the president added.
Trump also said tech executives like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff “called saying that the future of San Francisco is great,” pressure that convinced him to suspend the operation, at least temporarily.
Lurie, in a statement on X, said he spoke with the president and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who assured him the administration was “calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco.”
“I told him the same thing I told our residents: San Francisco is on the rise,” Lurie wrote. “Visitors are coming back, buildings are getting leased and purchased, and workers are coming back to the office…We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.”
The mayor added that city leaders would “welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery.”
Thursday’s change of plans is notable because the White House has largely ignored opposition from local leaders in other Democrat-run cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, and Washington, D.C., where the administration has used or attempted to send in scores of federal agents and National Guard troops for similar operations.
California leaders, reacting to the earlier news of the potential San Francisco surge, feared the Trump administration was hoping to use the operation to stir up unrest as a pretext to then send the military into the city or invoke the Insurrection Act.
In a video statement on Wednesday, California Governor and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom accused the president of using tactics “right out of the dictator’s handbook.”
“This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire,” Newsom said. “We need to call that out and we cannot play his game.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated with new information.
