Enough.
Children in zip ties. Warrantless raids on homes. Masked men rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night onto an apartment building. A disabled Iraq War veteran strip-searched, detained for days, denied an attorney and put in isolation. A 79-year-old body-slammed and pinned to the asphalt. A woman, nine-months pregnant, shoved and arrested. Tear gas. Smoke grenades.
Those aren’t the experiences of immigrants or criminals but rather law-abiding American citizens at the hands of agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol. These citizens’ only crimes were being in the wrong place at the wrong time or living in a Democratic-run city or being related to a suspect or looking Latino.
Immigrants without proper documentation have it much worse. Men, women and children are taken from streets, farms and factories into unmarked cars by anonymous agents; once in ICE custody, they’re dying at the greatest rates in 20 years. These aren’t all criminals. Far, far from it. The overwhelming majority of the deported this year have never been convicted of anything. Hundreds – some with and some without criminal records – have vanished without due process indefinitely into the prison systems of other countries infamous for torturing inmates.
Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.
Things are not OK, and they are getting worse fast.
But late last month something extraordinary happened: The president blinked.
As Trump threatened to flood San Francisco, Oakland and, likely, the rest of the Bay Area with immigration agents and soldiers, Silicon Valley business leaders, including Salesforce’s Mark Benioff and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, urged him to stand down.
And, at least for the time being, he did.
Since the beginning of this administration, Silicon Valley’s biggest bosses have appeased the president, capitulating to his every whim – agreeing to pay export taxes, giving away equity to the government, defunding schools for Latino students and ending diversity programs.
But the truth is that rich business leaders are, arguably, the only group that our transactional president will listen to. And the Bay Area has many of them, who oversee the world’s largest companies that are driving nearly all the growth of the stock market.
The lesson they need to learn is that when they stand up to the president and speak in unison, they have the power to protect the Bay Area from becoming the next battleground. They have the power to do what’s right.
The war from within
The chronology of the last few months shows a troubling acceleration of aspirational authoritarianism.
In September, the president of the United States told hundreds of generals that he will be using them to fight a “war from within,” pointing to Democratic-run cities which he told them to use as “training grounds” for their troops.
In October, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, giving the president power to turn active-duty troops into a civilian law enforcement force. Further stoking fears that he has authoritarian motivations, the president said he would “love to” run for a third term – a patently unconstitutional path that he won’t rule out.
Since June, when he ordered thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of active-duty Marines to confront protesters who were incited by the brutality of stepped-up immigration raids in Los Angeles, he has deployed troops to Washington, D.C. – a city White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called more violent than Baghdad – as well as Memphis, Chicago and Portland, Ore. (Federal courts have, at least temporarily, stalled deployments within the latter two cities.)
And though the Bay Area avoided deployments last month, the threat remains.
“Let’s see how you do,” Trump wrote to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on Truth Social.
The fact is the door remains wide open.
And we should in no way expect the president to have taken the hint from Tuesday. Donald Trump was very much on the ballot in California, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and even Mississippi – all states where voters rejected his party by large, even historic, margins.
Americans have seen enough. So have we.
However, let’s be clear: The specter of hundreds, even thousands, more masked ICE and Border Patrol agents bulldozing through the Bay Area still looms. For that matter, so too does the prospect of National Guardsmen, active-duty Marines and 14-ton ambush-proof, mine-resistant armored vehicles made for Afghanistan patrolling our city streets.
The real reason
Trump’s threats to invade the Bay Area and other Democratic-run cities were never about crime, and the president is no crime-fighter.
Trump ended his last term pardoning a cop killer; he began this term pardoning hundreds of people who assaulted police officers on Jan. 6, 2021.
This isn’t about restoring law and order either. This administration is defying court orders at rates unimaginable in any other presidency. And the cities he calls crime-ridden dystopias, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, are anything but. The murder rate in L.A. has been dropping for three years and is on track this year to hit its lowest level since 1968. San Francisco’s murder rate this year is on track to be at its lowest point since 1954.
Not only are L.A. and San Francisco far from failing, they’re also centers of global capitalism and among the wealthiest cities on the planet.
Even in Oakland, murders have fallen 21% year over year. Portland’s murder rate this year has fallen 51%, the steepest drop reported by 68 major city police departments. Chicago had fewer murders this summer than at any point since 1965.
It’s nearly inevitable that Trump will threaten the Bay Area again. It has too many of the things he hates most: Democrats, immigrants and universities.
Unfortunately, there are few in the Bay Area, or anywhere, whom he will listen to. But, as we learned last month, our valley’s Big Tech leaders can still sway the president. Kudos to them for standing up.
Let’s hope they stand firm — because he will, almost certainly, be back.