After months of deployments by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the National Guard across American cities, federal agents have been preparing to descend into San Francisco.
Local resistance groups have been coordinating with activists in other cities across the country that have been besieged by federal law enforcement. Thousands of volunteers, coordinating through Signal group chats, Zoom calls, and social media posts, planned protests and spread the word that federal troops are on their way to San Francisco. Even though they aren’t—yet.
On Thursday morning, SF mayor Daniel Lurie posted on Instagram and X to announce that he had spoken with President Donald Trump and convinced him to call off the federal agents that had planned to go to San Francisco this Saturday. Trump confirmed that on Truth Social shortly thereafter, writing, “Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”
Activists and San Francisco residents are not exactly convinced, and so the organizing continues.
Early this week, a contingent of around 100 federal law enforcement agents converged on Coast Guard Island, a small base in Alameda, just across the Bay from San Francisco that federal officials say is being used as a staging area for upcoming immigration raids. Only one road leads to and from the island, and once word spread about the deployment, agents were quickly boxed in. Around 200 protesters showed up Thursday morning to try to disrupt their movements, resulting in clashes.
On Wednesday night, a group called Bay Resistance held an educational webinar that drew a massive turnout; due to the limitations of the group’s Zoom subscription, it had to cap the call at 5,000 attendees. Hundreds more viewed a recording afterwards.
“The Bay is not going to sit quietly,” Emily Lee, a Bay Resistance organizer, said on the mobilization call. “We are definitely going to be standing up together against this administration.”
Throughout the call, organizers spoke in English with Spanish translations, sharing plans for upcoming actions across the Bay. They talked about lessons learned from their direct communications with organizers in Los Angeles who mobilized against the ICE raids and federal troop deployments there, and the importance of taking the tack of Portland’s protesters, who relied on humor and inflatable animals to counter ICE actions and protest Trump’s claims of the city being a “war ravaged” hellhole.