The president said he wants to give the mayor and local law enforcement a chance to keep bringing down crime, which has seen steep declines in recent years.
President Donald Trump said on Oct. 23 that he won’t send federal agents to San Francisco this week. He had planned to send agents to the city in a crackdown on illegal immigration and violent crime, but called off the plans after speaking to the city’s mayor about recent efforts by local law enforcement to bring down crime.
“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 in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress,” Trump wrote on social media. “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.”
Trump said that while he told Lurie he thought the mayor was “making a mistake,” suggesting federal agents could bring down crime faster and “remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove,” he decided to give Lurie a chance to see how he does.
“The people of San Francisco have come together on fighting Crime, especially since we began to take charge of that very nasty subject. Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great,” Trump said. “They want to give it a ’shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday.”
The decision comes one day after the Department of Homeland Security said it would soon send agents to San Francisco to target and remove “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.” The agency did not, however, say when the deployment was slated to occur.
Trump had said in a Fox News interview that aired on Oct. 19 that San Francisco would be the next city to see federal immigration enforcement operations.
“We’re going to make it great. It’ll be great again. San Francisco is a great city. It won’t be great if it keeps going like this,” he said.
By Jacob Burg
