The Trump administration has dispatched more than 100 federal agents, including from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to Coast Guard Base Alameda and they will begin to arrive Thursday, according to a source familiar with the operation.
In other cities, National Guard deployments have come in support of immigration enforcement operations, which President Donald Trump has said are critical to protecting U.S. jobs and public safety.
On Sunday, Trump told Fox News: “We’re going to San Francisco and we’ll make it great. It’ll be great again. San Francisco is a great city. It won’t be great if it keeps going like this. We’re gonna go to San Francisco. The difference is they want us in San Francisco.”
Earlier this week, Mayor Daniel Lurie said sending troops would not help make San Francisco safer nor help stem its drug crisis, and that soldiers could not legally arrest drug dealers. City Attorney David Chiu warned that his office would sue to keep soldiers from being deployed to San Francisco’s streets.
The source spoke to the Chronicle on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection.
Trump said he might invoke the Insurrection Act, a law that allows presidents to deploy troops on U.S. soil. He has already sent National Guard members to Los Angeles; Memphis, Tenn.; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and Portland, Ore. The Chicago deployment is on hold in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Portions of California have different restrictions in place guiding how aggressive federal immigration agents can be in their efforts to arrest and deport immigrants without legal status.
In the federal court district that covers Sacramento and Kern counties and eastern portions of the state, a judge approved an injunction aimed at preventing agents from racially profiling residents by targeting them based on their appearance or what language they’re speaking. It was approved after a January raid in which agents targeted farmworkers.
The order prohibits Border Patrol agents from stopping people without reasonable suspicion that they are noncitizens in the U.S. and are in violation of federal immigration law. It also bars them from arresting people without a warrant if agents don’t have probable cause to believe the person is likely to flee.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California was swiftly fired after she told Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in charge of the raids, that he was required to follow the order.
A similar order was approved in the district covering Los Angeles and other portions of Southern California, where Border Patrol and ICE agents have conducted raids in public places. But the Supreme Court overturned that order. In doing so, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Trump, said that stops in which U.S. citizens were targeted based on their appearance were both rare and harmless.
Such stops would be “brief” and once officers saw proper documentation of citizenship, residents would “promptly be let go,” he wrote. That has not occurred in practice: ProPublica reported that at least 170 American citizens have been held against their will by immigration agents since Trump took office in January, and in some cases have been beaten, shot, detained while pregnant and denied access to lawyers and loved ones.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement being deployed as part of the operation.
