California is prepared to sue “immediately” if Trump deploys troops to San Francisco, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday afternoon.
Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
SACRAMENTO — California is prepared to sue “immediately” if Trump deploys troops to San Francisco, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday afternoon.
“We’re standing up to this wannabe tyrant,” Newsom wrote in a statement. “The notion that the federal government can deploy troops into our cities with no justification grounded in reality, no oversight, no accountability, no respect for state sovereignty — it’s a direct assault on the rule of law.”
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Trump has not yet deployed any troops to San Francisco, but threatened to do so several times in recent days.
“We’re gonna go to San Francisco,” Trump said on Fox News on Sunday. “I think they want us in San Francisco. San Francisco was truly one of the great cities in the world, and then 15 years ago, it went woke.”
Newsom, who led San Francisco as mayor from 2004 until 2011, has aggressively resisted Trump’s efforts to send National Guard troops to American cities, saying they are unneeded. Other top leaders in San Francisco, including Mayor Daniel Lurie and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, have also rejected Trump’s calls to send in the National Guard.
National Guard members are prohibited by federal law from acting as police in American cities. Lurie and Jenkins have noted a deployment would not allow them to crack down on crime as Trump has suggested because they would not be able to investigate law-breaking or arrest drug dealers.
“Let me be clear — no local or elected San Francisco leaders want the National Guard deployed to San Francisco at the direction of the Trump Administration,” Jenkins said in a statement Monday.
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Trump’s comments targeting San Francisco came in the wake of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff welcoming the president to deploy the National Guard to act as police in the city, which would be illegal. Benioff, whose company is headquartered in the city but lives mostly in Hawaii, faced widespread backlash for his comments and issued a public apology.
Newsom joins a chorus of California officials, including Attorney General Rob Bonta and San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, who say they will sue if Trump sends in troops.
Newsom is already suing to end the federalization of National Guard troops in California, which began in June in response to protests over Trump’s aggressive mass deportation campaign in Los Angeles. Originally, Trump federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard, about a third of the CalGuard’s active members.
Most of those soldiers have been released from the deployment, but 300 remain federalized. Of those, 200 have been sent to Portland, Oregon, where they wait in limbo after a Trump-appointed judge blocked the president from deploying them on the streets. Fourteen were sent to Chicago to help train members of the Texas National Guard who were sent there. About 85 were still in the Los Angeles area as of earlier this month, according to a sworn declaration from a California Military Department lawyer.
At a Board of Supervisors hearing on Tuesday, Mayor Daniel Lurie said he has assembled a team of “public safety leaders, representatives from the city attorney’s office and other effective department heads to continue coordinating our local response to potential federal actions.” The group had met earlier that day, Lurie told supervisors.
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Lurie also said he’s thought about the possibility of the National Guard being deployed to San Francisco since the first day of his term and stressed that he’s committed to making sure that San Francisco police do not participate in immigration enforcement.
Lucy Hodgman contributed reporting.
