The ‘Surge’ of Troops May Not Come to San Francisco, but the City Is Ready Anyway

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.

“We’re going to prepare ourselves, but we’re also going to be joyful,” Lee said. “San Francisco, the Bay Area, we know how to have a good party here. And we need to show folks we’re not going to stop living our lives.”

The morning after the Zoom webinar, Trump apparently called off plans to send agents into San Francisco. But a planned resistance rally at city hall went ahead anyway. The rally was arranged by an array of groups including Bay Resistance, local labor unions, and local activist groups. Speakers ranging from cultural leaders to SF district supervisors took the podium to make it very clear that they were not interested in putting a stop to the actions they had planned.

In the crowd of around 150 people, supporters held up signs that read things like “ICE Out of CA” and “We Hella Love Justice.” One woman, who said she is a longtime San Francisco resident and former circus performer, twirled around on the sidewalk in a Vladimir Putin mask with a small scowling Trump puppet dangling below her.

Courtesy of Boone Ashworth

The crowd was pumped. “We have the mechanisms to really get people out in mass numbers,” says Claire Donovan, Bay Resistance’s communications manager. “We're not scared to use that.”

Speakers at the rally were quick to challenge Trump’s claim earlier this week that he had “unquestioned power” to send troops into San Francisco, claiming that, “the difference is I think they want us in San Francisco.” He seemed to be referencing the recent statements of a couple high-profile billionaires. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had called for the National Guard to be deployed to San Francisco ahead of his company’s Dreamforce conference last week, then walked back that statement after a wave of controversy. Former DOGE head Elon Musk also advocated sending in the National Guard.

However the tech leaders feel, San Francisco officials who spoke on the steps of city hall Thursday were very clear about denouncing the deployment of federal troops in the city. As SF District 9 supervisor Jackie Fielder put it in her speech, they were all only out there because Marc Benioff, the powerful Trump-aligned billionaire, had said it was time to send in the National Guard. Fielder condemned the billionaires like him who have called for troops to police the city.

San Francisco supervisor Jackie Fielder speaks at the rally.

Courtesy of Boone Ashworth

“This city does not belong to them,” Fielder said. “It belongs to us. We are not backing down. We are not flying under anyone's radar.”

“Thank you for calling Marc Benioff out on his shit!” someone else shouted after Fielder spoke.

But even without the “surge,” people in Big Tech’s front yard are still fired up. “Ultimately we see it as a win for people power that are organizing help to push them in this,” Donovan says. “But it's not over. There's still so much Bay Area, so we want to be ready and stand in solidarity."

The crowd outside SF City Hall.

Courtesy of Boone Ashworth

The federal presence at Coast Guard Island is still ongoing, and protesters are continuing to stage demonstrations nearby. San Francisco may be out of the crosshairs for now, but Oakland, San Jose, and other Bay Area cities are still on alert. The rallies will continue even if federal troops don’t show up in greater numbers.

As Donovan puts it, all these resistance efforts are in service of having a story to tell.

“We need to reframe the story so that it's showing that communities are the ones under attack,” Donovan says. “It's not that our cities are riddled with crime.”