President Trump Thursday morning called off a planned deployment of federal immigration agents to San Francisco. He said in a social media post that he had stopped action in San Francisco “at the request of friends who live in the Bay Area,” The New York Times reports, who vouched for the work of the city’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie.
The move came just as the agents were beginning to gather at the Alameda Coast Guard base in the bay.
It’s all something of a feint, because earlier this very week, it wasn’t ICE agents the president was threatening to set loose on Baghdad by the Bay — it was the National Guard. Which would be an occupation far more disruptive to the citizenry of the city and the people of California than even the formerly planned, amped-up, macho paramilitary exercises that are the norm for immigration sweeps during the current administration.
Putting military troops into a city that under Lurie has seen total crime rates decrease by more than 26% this year — in every single category except for sex trafficking, and what’s San Francisco without sex? — would have been a buffoonish, churlish, merely political authoritarian move.
And, so far, the president has not rescinded his threat to randomly send troops to a California city whose residents, City Hall and Police Department do not want them.
In a Fox News interview earlier this week, “Trump said he was eyeing San Francisco next to send the National Guard, adding that he had ‘unquestioned power’ to do so under the Insurrection Act,” CalMatters reports.
But there is nothing like an insurrection in the city of San Francisco.
Of course, neither were there insurrections in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland or Washington, D.C., and that didn’t stop Trump from sending the military into those American cities, though he didn’t cite the Insurrection Act as an excuse in those deployments.
In his talk-show threats against a city he doesn’t like because it doesn’t vote for him, he said: “The difference is 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.”
Does he truly believe the city should be under military occupation because so many of its residents support DEI schemes and other progressive programs?
Lurie, a moderate Democrat and scion of the Levi’s fortune, said sending in troops “will do nothing … to make our city safer.”
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in a CalMatters interview about the city’s plunging crime rate said that the main worry with sending in large numbers for ICE raids was that they could spark a currently non-existent problem the president is eager for the city to have.
“There has to be civil unrest in San Francisco, and what we know and have seen is that U.S. Customs, Border Control and ICE are being deployed first in a manner that creates chaos and provokes arrest,” Jenkins said.
Some of the “friends” who asked Trump to call off the dogs were Marc Benioff, the CEO of the online giant Salesforce, a Trump political supporter who outraged other locals by recently saying he did want the National Guard in San Francisco, and later apologized and said he did not want troops in the city, and Jensen Huang, the president and chief executive of Nvidia, the chipmaking entity that has negotiated with Trump over his efforts to onshore more chips manufacturing.
Lurie is handling the volatile situation with quiet aplomb, not an easy riser to the bait that is the president’s constant provocations of American mayors.
“San Francisco is on the rise,” Lurie said on Thursday. “We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.” He is also said to have talked with the president about a post-pandemic tourism boom in the city.
Staying calm and level-setting truths is the right way to handle a president who too often is anything but calm.