# San Francisco Federal Surge Reversal On **October 23, 2025**, [[Donald Trump]] called off a planned "surge" of federal immigration agents into San Francisco, two days before it was due to begin. He announced the reversal on [[Truth Social]] and credited a phone call from Mayor [[Daniel Lurie]] the night before, along with calls from [[Jensen Huang]] of [[NVIDIA]] and Salesforce CEO [[Marc Benioff]]. Earlier that month, Benioff had publicly invited the deployment. Elsewhere, the second term's domestic-deployment fights were settled in court. Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago were fought over Title 10 federalization, the [[Posse Comitatus Act]], and the [[Insurrection Act]]; see [[National Guard]] and [[Trump v. Illinois]]. San Francisco was the exception. **No judge was involved. The deployment was stopped through private access to the president: a mayor who had avoided picking fights with Trump, and two of the richest men in the country.** ## Timeline | Date | Development | |------|-------------| | **Oct 10, 2025** | A New York Times interview with [[Marc Benioff]] is published before Salesforce's Dreamforce conference (Oct 14–16). Asked about sending the National Guard to San Francisco, he says: "We don't have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I'm all for it." | | **Oct 2025** | [[Neighbors for a Better San Francisco]], a moderate group funded by billionaires, puts up billboards reading "Dear Mr Trump: No thanks, we're good." *(SF Standard; single-source)* | | **Oct 16, 2025** | [[Ron Conway]] resigns from the Salesforce Foundation board. In an email to Benioff he writes: "It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired." He also calls the proposal "an unwanted invasion of San Francisco by federal troops." | | **Oct 17, 2025** | Benioff apologizes on X: "I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco." | | **Oct 19, 2025** | In a [[Fox News]] interview with [[Maria Bartiromo]], Trump says he will send troops to San Francisco. | | **Week of Oct 20** | Reports say more than 100 [[CBP]] and other federal agents are due at Coast Guard Island in Alameda, the staging point for the Bay Area operation. | | **Oct 22, 2025, 7:30–7:55 pm** | Trump and Lurie talk by phone for about 25 minutes. The mayor's office later released only a calendar entry for the call and withheld all other records as privileged. | | **Oct 23, 2025 (morning)** | Trump posts on Truth Social: "The Federal Government was preparing to 'surge' San Francisco, California, on Saturday, but friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge." He adds: "I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around," and "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!" | | **Oct 23, 2025 (dawn)** | Protesters blockade Coast Guard Island. Around 7:15 am, roughly ten vehicles, some marked Border Patrol, drive toward the crowd. Agents use flash-bangs and pepper balls, and a pastor is struck in the face. | | **Late Oct–Nov 2025** | Federal agencies and SFPD step up drug enforcement through the city's Drug Market Agency Coordination Center. At a Nov 19 police-union meeting, Deputy Chief Nicole Jones ties the operation to "keeping President Trump from deploying the National Guard and ICE." *(SF Standard; single-source)* | | **Mar 5, 2026** | Minutes after being fired as DHS secretary, [[Kristi Noem]] praises Lurie as "cooperative" and says "we have great conversations." | | **Mar 26, 2026** | At a Cabinet meeting Trump says of Lurie: "He's a Democrat, but he's trying very hard, but we can do it much more effectively, because he can't do what we do." He floats federal agents for San Francisco again but does not send them. | ## What Lurie said Lurie argued the city's own numbers made the case: "San Francisco is on the rise. Visitors are coming back, buildings are getting leased and purchased, and workers are coming back to the office." He said crime was down nearly 30% citywide and violent crime was at its lowest level since the 1950s. He did not attack Trump. Throughout 2025 he had avoided any public conflict with the administration, which the San Francisco Chronicle described as the strategy that "may have stopped federal deployment to S.F." His first notable break came in September 2026, when he asked federal immigration authorities to release Ho Yin Mo, an aide to Assemblymember Catherine Stefani detained by [[ICE]] at the Las Vegas airport. ## Why it matters in this KB **1. The check was a phone tree, not a court.** Judges stopped the Chicago and Portland deployments. San Francisco was spared because people Trump considers friends called him. That protection depends on personal access, and the city can't rely on it the next time. **2. The billionaire class was on both sides within two weeks.** Benioff invited the troops. Conway, the city's longest-serving tech power broker, broke with him in public. Then Benioff and Huang helped call the troops off. The [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] usually treats "tech money" as one bloc. This episode shows it splitting, and shows the split mattering. **3. The price is still unclear.** The only public evidence of a quid pro quo is one deputy chief's remark about a drug crackdown. The mayor's office has withheld the records of the call. All that is documented is what Trump said and what followed, and this page keeps the two separate. ## See Also - [[Daniel Lurie]] · [[Marc Benioff]] · [[Jensen Huang]] · [[Ron Conway]] - [[National Guard]] · [[Trump v. Illinois]] · [[Insurrection Act]] · [[Posse Comitatus Act]] - [[Operation Midway Blitz]] · [[Operation Metro Surge]] · [[CBP]] · [[ICE]] - [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] · [[Neighbors for a Better San Francisco]]