Bay Area Spared From Federal Immigration Enforcement ‘Surge,’ Officials Say

A major escalation of immigration enforcement expected in the Bay Area has been canceled, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee confirmed Friday, a day after President Donald Trump called off a planned “surge” of federal officials into San Francisco.

The news comes after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials began to arrive this week at Alameda’s Coast Guard Island, where they had planned to set up a “place of operation,” according to the Coast Guard. On Thursday, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said that after a phone call with Trump, the president would not go through with plans to bring federal officials into the city this weekend, but whether the cancellation applied to the wider Bay Area was initially unclear.

Now, Lee said, it appears the region will avoid an immigration enforcement surge, at least for now.

“I spoke with Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez, who confirmed through her communications with ICE that Border Patrol operations are canceled for the greater Bay Area — which includes Oakland — at this time,” Lee said in a statement.

Sanchez said San Francisco’s ICE field director for removal operations, Sergio Albarran, told her that the direction from the Trump administration was to cancel planned enforcement actions.

Still, she said she believes the city should remain ready for an operation at any time.

“They’re canceled for now. That doesn’t mean that they won’t come back,” Sanchez told KQED. “I think that we should be ready for operations to go at any point in time.

“I’ll just say quite candidly, I’m not put at ease by that,” she continued.

Trump has been homing in on the Bay Area as his next target for expanded immigration enforcement and National Guard deployment for weeks, on Sunday telling Fox News that forces would go into San Francisco.

Fears escalated Wednesday, after the Coast Guard confirmed that up to 100 Customs and Border Protection officials would begin staging at the agency’s Alameda base.

In other cities, expanded immigration enforcement has been followed by Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Portland, Ore. Though he has cited alleged spikes in crime and violent protests against immigration enforcement operations as justification, with little evidence to show for it, the deployments have all targeted Democrat-led cities and raised criticisms of abuse of power.

Gov. Gavin Newsom called the move part of the “authoritarian playbook” being used by Trump’s administration.

“You send first masked men to the cities that you want to militarize … communities are torn asunder, it creates anxiety and stress, and that manifests into expressions of free speech. And then you use those expressions and those images as the justification to send the guard and suppress free speech, suppress free expression,” he said during a press conference Wednesday.

As CBP-marked vehicles arrived in Oakland on Thursday, hundreds of protesters gathered at the bridge access to Coast Guard Island to block their path, spurring scuffles with law enforcement agents that injured at least two protesters.

Late Thursday night, two people were shot and injured by law enforcement officials after a U-Haul truck attempted to back onto the bridge to the base.

A smaller protest reconvened near the island Friday morning, where at least one person was sprayed by pepper balls.

Sanchez said she was unsure how many federal agents did arrive on Coast Guard Island, or whether they had departed.

Alameda County District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson said that she was concerned the federal agents were baiting Oakland, and that the situation remains fluid.

“Oakland is easy to point the finger at because people think we’re a violent city and that we’re lawless — we’re not,” she told reporters Friday. “It is just an easy example for the administration to come after people, specifically people of color, in a democratic city. That’s what I expect. Do I know that? No, that’s what my gut says.”

KQED’s Alex Hall contributed to this report.