U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are heading to the San Francisco Bay Area starting Wednesday for an immigration enforcement operation, according to the U.S. Coast Guard and three officials familiar with the plan.
The agents are planning to gather at the U.S. Coast Guard base in Alameda, a military installation near Oakland and across the bay from San Francisco. There has been no indication so far that National Guard troops will be involved.
The Coast Guard said in a statement that its property would serve as a base for Department of Homeland Security agencies starting on Wednesday.
“Through a whole-of-government approach, we are leveraging our unique authorities and capabilities to detect, deter and interdict illegal aliens, narco-terrorists and individuals intent on terrorism or other hostile activity before they reach our border,” the Coast Guard said.
President Trump has said several times that he wanted to send federal forces to San Francisco.
“San Francisco was truly one of the great cities of the world,” he said most recently in an interview that aired on Sunday on Fox News. “And then 15 years ago it went wrong, it went woke.”
Similar operations in Chicago and Los Angeles have caused consternation among city leaders and led to protests that in turn were cited as a rationale for military intervention. At one point, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois referred to the operations as an “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California charged that the administration was manufacturing a pretext for a military deployment. He suggested that Mr. Trump was sending federal agents to the Bay Area to rile people up and would then deploy the National Guard and claim credit for making the region safer.
“It’s absolutely predictable,” Mr. Newsom said Wednesday at an economic event in Stockton, about 80 miles east of San Francisco. “It’s a script that’s been written for centuries, the authoritarian playbook.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi and Representative Kevin Mullin, Democrats who represent Bay Area districts, said in a joint statement that federal agents could be arrested by the local authorities if they broke state law.
“While the president may enjoy absolute immunity courtesy of his rogue Supreme Court, those who operate under his orders do not,” they said. “Our state and local authorities may arrest federal agents if they break California law — and if they are convicted, the president cannot pardon them.”
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins of San Francisco said earlier this month that she would seek to prosecute federal agents who assaulted or harassed people in the city.
Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco, appearing with a host of other city officials in an impromptu, live-streamed news conference on Wednesday afternoon, said he was adamant that the city was ready, though he did not know what the federal government had planned.
He said the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management would help coordinate the response of city departments and local immigration groups to federal raids. The city’s actions would range from training city staff members to avoid cooperating with federal agents to distributing multilingual information about legal services at schools and libraries.
Mr. Lurie said San Francisco would remain a sanctuary city, as it has been since 1989, in which the local police do not assist federal immigration efforts.
Staring straight at the cameras and thrusting his fingers in the air, he implored San Franciscans to protest peacefully, saying the federal administration has “a playbook” in which it tries to use immigration raids to incite violence among protesters as a reason to bring in the National Guard. He said that would only sow chaos.
Mr. Lurie delivered some of his strongest criticism yet for the Trump administration, though he still refrained from saying the president’s name, as he has all year in an attempt to avoid the national political fray.
“This doesn’t make our city safer,” Mr. Lurie said of immigration raids. “It terrorizes our communities.”
In June, the Trump administration sent 700 U.S. Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops to Southern California after a rash of combative immigration raids set off protests. A federal judge later found the troops had been used illegally to conduct domestic law enforcement, but the ruling has been stayed pending an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Most of the troops have since been released, but about 300 National Guard soldiers remain under federal orders that have extended their activation through the November election and well into next year. Nearly 200 California troops are in Oregon, on orders from Mr. Trump to deploy in Portland. A small group has also been sent to Chicago to train other federally deployed National Guard troops.
Bay Area residents have been on higher alert since Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said on Monday that troops were heading to San Francisco.
Word of an imminent operation began circulating this week among immigrant rights groups, public-school teachers and activists in San Francisco as they encouraged people to spread the word to their friends and neighbors and develop a safety plan. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report on Wednesday that agents were being sent to Alameda.
Mr. Lurie said that regular San Franciscans could work to protect each other. He suggested that citizens help their undocumented neighbors by going to the grocery store for them, taking their children to school or supporting their small businesses.
“San Francisco will never stand by as our neighbors are targeted, and neither will I,” he said. “We’ve got this.”
Laurel Rosenhall contributed reporting from Stockton, Calif.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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