After months of deployment by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the National Guard in U.S. cities, federal agents prepared to descend on San Francisco.
Local resistance groups coordinated with activists in other cities across the country under siege 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 were on their way to San Francisco. Even if they aren’t—not yet.
On Thursday morning, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie took to Instagram and X to announce that he spoke with President Donald Trump and convinced him to subpoena the federal agents who planned to go to San Francisco this Saturday. Trump confirmed shortly after on Truth Social, writing: “Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff and others have called and said that the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a shot.” That’s why we won’t push up on San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”
Activists and residents of San Francisco are not exactly convinced, and so the organizing continues.
Early this week, a contingent of about 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 of the deployment spread, agents were quickly boxed in. About 200 protesters arrived on Thursday morning to try to disrupt their movements, leading to 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 limit the call to 5,000 participants. Hundreds of others watched a recording of it.
“The Bay is not going to sit still,” Emily Lee, a Bay Resistance organizer, said on the mobilization call. “We are definitely going to stand up together against this administration.”
Throughout the call, organizers spoke in English with Spanish translations and shared plans for upcoming actions across the Bay Area. They talked about lessons learned from their direct communications with organizers in Los Angeles who have mobilized against the ICE raids and federal troop deployments there, and the importance of countering Portland’s protesters, who have relied on humor and inflatable animals to counter ICE actions and protest Trump’s claims that the city is a “war-torn” hell.