Trump Calls Off Federal Operation in San Francisco

President Trump announced on Thursday that he has called off the deployment of federal immigration agents to San Francisco, just as they were beginning to gather at a Coast Guard base in the Bay Area.

Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had stopped the federal action in San Francisco at the request of friends who live in the Bay Area and who vouched for the work of the city’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie.

Mr. Trump specifically cited Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, who set off a local firestorm for initially saying he wanted the National Guard in San Francisco, and Jensen Huang, the president and chief executive of Nvidia. Mr. Benioff later apologized and said he did not want Guard troops in the city.

Mr. Trump said that federal officials were “preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday,” until his friends asked him to stop because Mr. Lurie was making “substantial progress.”

Mr. Lurie said in a news conference that he had not asked business leaders to intervene, and only learned of the president’s reversal when Mr. Trump called him late Wednesday night. He said the two men spoke about San Francisco’s recent drop in crime, the return of tourists after the pandemic, reductions in homeless encampments and the city’s booming artificial intelligence industry.

The president, Mr. Lurie said, had “asked me for nothing.”

“In our conversation, the president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco,” Mr. Lurie said. “Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning.”

It was not immediately clear whether that meant the Trump administration had called off the entire planned U.S. Customs and Border Protection operation for all of the Bay Area, or just for San Francisco. Mr. Lurie said that he and Mr. Trump did not discuss other cities.

“He only spoke about San Francisco,” he said.

In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, who spoke to Mr. Lurie after the call with President Trump, interpreted the decision broadly. Mr. Mahan said that he believed federal agents had been called off from his city, the largest in Northern California with nearly one million residents.

“I think the White House made the right decision,” Mr. Mahan said in an interview. He added that he had also called Mr. Huang, of Nvidia, to thank him for weighing in on the region’s behalf.

But less affluent parts of the Bay Area were skeptical. In Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland, local leaders worried that only San Francisco had been given a reprieve, and protests persisted outside Coast Guard Island, a facility in the city of Alameda that was to have been used as a base for the federal operation. Members of the crowd tried to block cars from entering the base, including at least two Border Patrol vehicles.

A cheer initially went up later in the morning as word spread that Mr. Trump had called off the action in San Francisco, but it was quickly replaced by confusion over whether the entire Bay Area had been spared.

The California Highway Patrol eventually said it needed to open one traffic lane for base access and threatened to begin towing vehicles that were blocking the entrance. By late afternoon, about 100 demonstrators had been winnowed to a few dozen and C.H.P. officers in riot gear had cleared the way for traffic as protesters played “The Imperial March” from “Star Wars.”

Shawna Pacheco, an assistant chief with the Highway Patrol, said officers arrested two people, one of whom was blocking the entrance to the base and refusing to move. Details on the second arrest were not immediately available.

With one of the highest costs of living in the nation, San Francisco has a relatively low estimated population of undocumented residents, compared with other major cities in California.

A 2023 analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that about 42,000 of the city’s population of more than 800,000 people were living without authorization in the country. Los Angeles County, by comparison, is believed to be home to more than one million undocumented immigrants.

In Alameda County, estimates put the undocumented population at about 100,000.

Mayor Barbara Lee of Oakland, whose skyline can be seen from the Coast Guard base, said she had not heard from Mr. Trump and did not expect her city to be spared from immigration raids.

“We have no idea. This is very fluid,” Ms. Lee said. “We are moving forward with our plans, and we are prepared.”

In August, Mr. Trump named Oakland among several cities that he was eyeing for a federal crackdown because of high crime rates. After mentioning Oakland, he said, “We don’t even mention that anymore, they’re so far gone.”

The president has not addressed Oakland since then. But Ursula Jones Dickson, the district attorney in Alameda County, said that she still expected Oakland to be targeted by federal agents.

“We know they’re baiting Oakland, and that’s why San Francisco all of a sudden is off the table,” Ms. Jones Dickson said. “I’m not going to be quiet about what’s coming.”

In remarks at the White House on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he had received “four or five calls” from tech executives, telling him that they were working with Mayor Lurie and asking him to halt his federal surge.

Mr. Benioff, the Salesforce chief executive, when asked for comments for this article, shared screenshots of the president’s Truth Social post, but did not answer questions about their conversation.

Representatives with Nvidia, the artificial intelligence chipmaker, declined to comment. Mr. Huang, the company’s chief executive, owns a mansion on Billionaire’s Row, the San Francisco neighborhood where Mr. Lurie’s mother, Mimi Haas, also lives.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of San Francisco-based OpenAI, also reached out to the White House about federal agents moving into the city, according to a person close to Mr. Altman who was not authorized to speak publicly.

David Sacks, another resident of the neighborhood and Mr. Trump’s czar for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, had previously posted on X that the National Guard should come to the city. By late Thursday morning, he had not commented publicly, and he did not respond to a request for comment.

Legal experts noted that litigation strategy might also have factored into the president’s decision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is based in San Francisco, and it is currently weighing appeals involving Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard to augment immigration enforcement.

Among them are cases involving the deployment and use of National Guard troops in Los Angeles after immigration protests this summer and the more recent mobilization in Portland, Ore., a city that Mr. Trump asserted, without evidence, was on fire on Thursday.

It is possible, legal experts said, that Mr. Trump realized he had more to lose by having federal agents rush into the city where judges were considering whether federal force was justified for domestic purposes.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office said Mr. Trump “finally, for once, listened to reason” in deciding to call off the San Francisco immigration enforcement actions.

And Representative Nancy Pelosi, who represents most of San Francisco, praised Mr. Lurie for his “exceptional leadership” in a statement. The two have known each other for decades through the city’s elite social and political circles.

“I salute Mayor Lurie for standing up for our city and reinforcing San Francisco’s strength, optimism and recovery,” she said.

Mr. Lurie said that despite the president’s pledge, the city planned to “continue to monitor the situation.”

“Our city remains prepared for any scenario. We have a plan in place that can be activated at any moment,” the mayor said. But, he added, “it is my sincere hope that we never have to put that planning into action.”

In San Francisco, the Mission District, the center of the city’s Latino culture, was quiet on Thursday morning. The streets were far emptier than usual. Normally packed buses were nearly empty. Fewer children showed up to schools.

“There’s a great deal of anxiety, stress and confusion,” said Cassondra Curiel, the president of the local teachers union. She said families were keeping children home out of fear.

After word spread that federal agents weren’t coming to San Francisco, Ms. Curiel called it “a small relief.” She said she hoped that Mr. Lurie had asked the president to end the federal operation across the entire Bay Area, not just in San Francisco.

Reporting was contributed by Hamed Aleaziz in Washington, Laurel Rosenhall in Sacramento, Cade Metz in San Francisco and Felicia Mello in Alameda, Calif.

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