S.F. federal drug cases plummeted under Trump administration, data shows

Just hours after staving off what was to be President Donald Trump’s latest immigration enforcement surge in a major blue city, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie took to the national stage and announced that he would, in fact, “welcome” some federal assistance — but of a different kind. 

The planned militarized raids would harm the city and stifle its recovery, Lurie said in an Oct. 23 press conference, relaying what he told Trump the previous evening. But Lurie also explicitly encouraged the continuation of city partnerships with agencies including FBI, DEA, ATF and U.S. Attorney’s Office, he said, “to get drugs and drug dealers off the streets.” 

Trump, who described San Francisco as a “mess” days earlier, said in a Truth Social post that Lurie had helped convince him to call off the troops, but believed the mayor was making a mistake.

“I told him … we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the law does not permit him to remove,” the post said. 

A Chronicle analysis of federal prosecution data, however, shows that since Trump took office, federal officials have significantly dialed back an initiative that targeted some of San Francisco’s most high-priority criminal offenders and fast-tracked the deportations of those convicted. 

Federal drug cases filed in San Francisco dropped by an average of more than 50% per month in 2025 compared to recent years; the result of a slowdown of the federal-local partnership Lurie described in his remarks without mentioning by name. 

That  initiative was an operation forged under the Biden administration dubbed “All Hands on Deck.”  The program directed the power of U.S. government against low-level dealers in San Francisco, where penalties for drug crimes are much stiffer in federal court compared to state court.

All Hands on Deck was among a wave of 2023 crackdowns that took aim at drug hotbeds in the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods, where users and dealers often congregated by the dozens. 

Crucial to the initiative was lowering the bar for the types of drug crimes that would be handled by San Francisco’s federal prosecutors, who had traditionally pursued cases against major players within the drug supply chain. 

Federal prosecutors in San Francisco filed an average of seven drug-dealing cases a month so far in 2025; plummeting from the average 15 monthly cases filed between August 2023 — when All Hands on Deck was launched — and December 2024.

The San Francisco figures are a stark example of a broader trend. A recent Reuters investigation found that the rate of federal drug charges filed this year was lower than it had been in decades; a downturn that comes after the Trump administration diverted thousands of federal agents who investigate crimes to instead focus on civil immigration roundups.  

In San Francisco, this included agents with the DEA, FBI, ATF who had been working with local police on drug busts, according to federal law-enforcement sources familiar with the operations. 

The Chronicle reached out to the local branches of FBI, ATF and DEA for comment on this story. Spokespeople for the FBI and DEA did not respond to questions about their agents’ reported shift to immigration enforcement, both citing the government shutdown. An automatic response from ATF stated that the agency’s spokesperson had been furloughed, also due to the shutdown. 

With their attention directed at immigration enforcement, federal agents have privately feared that hard-won gains in cleaning up San Francisco streets will begin to backslide.

“There were huge discussions going, ‘hey, we need to focus on the threat, and not going out there chasing people for immigration enforcement operations,” said one federal law-enforcement official.

The Chronicle spoke to multiple current and federal officials on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly,in accordance with the Chronicle’s policies. 

Michelle Lo, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Attorney’s Office of Northern California, said the office wasn’t able to comment on the charging data reviewed by the Chronicle due to staffing shortages related to the federal government shutdown. 

Lo said the office remained committed to the All Hands on Deck operation, which was introduced by San Francisco’s former top federal prosecutor, Ismail Ramsey. Trump fired Ramsey in February, and in May appointed Craig Missakian as his successor.  

“Our work through this initiative has driven visible, positive changes,” Lo said in an emailed statement. “The partnership between federal and local law enforcement remains strong and a priority for this Office.”

When asked for comment from Lurie, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office directed the Chronicle to the mayor’s Oct. 23 remarks. 

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who has made drug cases one of her office’s top priorities, said the assistance by federal prosecutors provides a “critical deterrent” to drug dealing. 

“If a person goes to trial in federal court, they risk incarceration because the Federal bench takes this crime seriously,” a spokesperson for Jenkins’ office wrote in an emailed statement.  “In contrast, in San Francisco state court …  many judges do not treat drug dealing as a serious crime and the drug dealers therefore do not fear any significant consequence.”

Jenkins has met with Missakian once, on July 7, where they discussed the All Hands on Deck Partnership, the spokesperson said. No changes to the partnership were discussed. 

San Francisco has long posted low rates of violent crimes, and in recent years all categories of crime have been falling to historically low numbers. But the  scourge of fentanyl and the pandemic-era boom in the city’s open-air drug markets elevated what were traditionally treated as low-level street dealing offenses to one of the city’s most urgent priorities.

The operation established a partnership between local law enforcement and federal agencies including the FBI, DEA, ATF, aimed at maximizing the arrests of drug dealers and swiftly prosecuting them. 

Previously, street-dealing suspects were mostly prosecuted in San Francisco courts, where the risk of lengthy prison sentences and deportation for undocumented immigrants is much lower than in federal court. 

In a late 2023 interview, Ramsey said the operation was designed to address the devastation of fentanyl, and the unique challenges of San Francisco’s drug trafficking enterprise, which had evolved away from a traditional hierarchy. 

“We have basically a decentralized system of individual dealers who are acting as independent contractors,” Ramsey said at the time. (They’re) “being supplied their drugs on a regular basis, and then they’re commuting to San Francisco to deal drugs and return to their suppliers and do it all over again.” 

In San Francisco, where a large portion of those arrested in recent years for drug sales have been undocumented immigrants from Honduras, a federal conviction for drug dealing means near-certain removal from the U.S. 

Deportation is a much rarer outcome of a conviction in San Francisco courts, where sanctuary policies prevent city officials from working with federal agents on immigration actions. 

All Hands on Deck also fast-tracked prosecutions by offering low-level offenders plea deals that included no additional jail time, but three years of probation and stay-away orders from the Tenderloin. Undocumented immigrants who took this deal were immediately turned over to ICE for deportation proceedings.