Donald Trump will not deploy federal agents to San Francisco, the U.S. president and the city’s mayor said in separate social media posts on Thursday, a surprising stand-down as Trump pressures Democratic-led cities around the country to step up enforcement against crime and illegal immigration.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, a Democrat, said in a post on X that Trump called him Wednesday night to tell him he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment.

Lurie said the city would continue to partner with federal agencies to combat drug crime, but that “militarized immigration enforcement” would not help.

“We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong,” Lurie said.

Trump confirmed the agreement in a post on Truth Social, saying the federal government had been preparing a surge in San Francisco but would cancel it.

“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. “The people of San Francisco have come together on fighting Crime, especially since we began to take charge of that very nasty subject.”

The Republican president said two major tech executives — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff — had called him “saying that the future of San Francisco is great.”

Trump had indicated San Francisco would be a next stop for National Guard troops he was sending to various U.S. Democratic-led cities, moves that have been challenged in courts.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Wednesday that the Trump administration would send more than 100 federal agents to the city to ramp up immigration enforcement.

Protest against federal deployment

Despite the apparent stand-down, a handful of U.S. Border Patrol vehicles arrived at a U.S. Coast Guard base in the Bay Area on Thursday morning and were met with several hundred protesters.

Demonstrators carried signs reading “Stop the kidnappings” and “Protect our neighbours,” with one protester smacking the window of a truck as it passed by.

Federal agents eventually used less-lethal rounds to disperse the crowd, with protesters saying one person was injured by a projectile and that another had their foot run over.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, the former member of Congress and civil rights activist, said in televised remarks that a federal deployment would divide and intimidate.

“We will not allow outsiders to create chaos or exploit our city,” said Lee, a Democrat.

Trump aims to deport record numbers of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, portraying them as criminals and a drain on U.S. communities.

Democrats in major U.S. cities have criticized the crackdown, saying it has terrorized law-abiding residents, separated families and hurt businesses.

Trump has long highlighted what he views as rampant crime in San Francisco and had signalled in recent weeks that he would send federal agents there.

“We’re going to San Francisco and we’ll make it great,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday.

President Trump’s federalization and deployment of National Guard troops to both Oregon and Illinois are facing a pair of legal litmus tests — including one at the Supreme Court — that could be decided in the coming days.

At the heart of both challenges is whether or not to defer to the president’s assessment that major cities in both places — Portland and Chicago — are lawless and in need of immediate military intervention to protect federal property and immigration officers, despite local leaders and law enforcement saying otherwise. Both deployments were done against the wishes of Democratic state governors, and were quickly temporarily blocked by district courts.

On Monday, a divided panel on the 9th Circuit court of appeals overturned a temporary restraining order put in place by a federal judge in Portland, siding with the Trump administration, however another temporary restraining order remains in place.

That ruling came days after the 7th Circuit court of appeals upheld a similar block from a federal judge in Illinois on the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

Movement in both cases is expected in the coming days, in what has been a dizzying pingpong of legal disputes around Trump’s use of the military domestically in several Democratic-led cities  around the country. And while any decision will only impact troop deployment in an individual state, they could impact how courts weigh in on such cases going forward — and embolden the administration, legal experts say.

“This could be a pretty seminal week in terms of the bigger legal fight over domestic deployments,” says Scott R. Anderson, a fellow at the non-partisan Brookings Institution and senior editor of Lawfare.

The 9th Circuit and Portland, Ore. 

The 9th Circuit’s decision earlier this week only applies to one of the two temporary restraining orders that U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut issued this month to block the National Guard deployments — meaning that troops can still not be on the streets in Portland. But the federal government has asked Immergut to remove her second temporary order. A court hearing has been scheduled for Friday to discuss the dissolution of that order.

Karin J. Immergut, nominated to be U.S. district judge for the District of Oregon, attends a judicial nomination hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee October 24, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

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The 9th Circuit is also deciding whether or not to revisit the ruling made earlier this week with a larger group of judges — and that decision could come before Immergut’s deadline.

Trump has said that the 9th Circuit decision has made him feel empowered to send the National Guard to any city where he deems it necessary.

“That was the decision. I can send the National Guard if I see problems,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. In recent days, Trump has renewed an interest in sending troops to San Francisco.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University Loyola Law School and an expert in constitutional law, worries the ruling by the 9th Circuit “authorized blindness to facts.”

“It said [Trump] can decide that there’s a war when there’s nothing but bluebirds,” he says, noting that’s likely why an immediate call for a full review was made. “I fully expect a larger group of 9th Circuit judges to say we don’t have to be blind to what’s actually going on in order to give ample deference to the Trump administration.”

The Supreme Court and Chicago

At the same time, the Trump administration has issued an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on whether National Guard troops can be deployed in Illinois, after the 7th Circuit court of appeals upheld a district court’s block.

It’s unknown when, or if, the Supreme Court will issue a decision, although experts expect it in the coming days as well.

The decision, although not precedent-setting, will likely clarify the president’s power to deploy federal military resources — and how deferential the courts should be to his administration’s presentation of facts — but only to a point. Emergency decisions are usually short, without much reasoning provided by the justices, experts say.

“It ends up kind of putting the onus on district and appellate courts to read the tea leaves of those interim orders to inform these much larger questions in very different factual environments, you know, possibly months in the future,” says Chris Mirasola, a national security law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

National Guard troops arrive at an immigration processing and detention facility on October 09, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois.

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He says that while the emergency decisions from the Supreme Court don’t apply broadly, in recent months, some judges have started to treat them as if they do.

“I think what we’re going to get in at least the medium term is even more confusion than we’ve had so far,” he says.

But just how the Supreme Court might weigh in isn’t clear.

“I think it’s a harder case for the Supreme Court than some people might think, who go in with the assumption the Supreme Court is just naturally inclined toward the administration’s positions on things — and it is in many contexts,” says Anderson of the Brookings Institution.

He says that while it’s standard for courts to be deferential to the president, it’s also standard to believe the facts presented by the local courts.

“That is a tricky, tricky sort of situation here,” Anderson says.

What could this mean for possible deployments going forward?

These two expected decisions will only directly affect Portland or Chicago. But the implications of both – especially something from the Supreme Court – could have ripple effects in future litigation.

Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, says that what’s particularly worrying is that the Department of Justice has been expressly celebrating high arrest counts by law enforcement in places like Chicago, while still saying the military is necessary to help.

“If the bar is so low that the President can use the military at a time when his administration is touting how effective civilian law enforcement is, it becomes hard to imagine a scenario where he couldn’t deploy the military,” she says.

Experts say that these legal challenges are just the beginning of what will surely be a long and winding road through the U.S. court system.

“This is really just the first battle. There are a lot of legal questions that come after this,” Anderson says.