President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is calling off plans to deploy federal troops to San Francisco after speaking to the city’s mayor and following backlash from the tech industry.
“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’s post said.
He added that some of the “friends” who asked Trump to hold off on deploying the National Guard in San Francisco included the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, and the CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff.
“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. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday,” the president wrote.
In a separate statement, Lurie confirmed that he spoke to Trump last night, saying, “I told him the same thing I told our residents: San Francisco is on the rise.”
“We have work to do, and we would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery,” the mayor added. “We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.”
Trump has toyed with the idea of sending federal troops to San Francisco since the summer, but recent support from Benioff, an influential tech mogul, gave the suggestion more weight.
Earlier this month, Benioff told the New York Times that he would support Trump sending federal troops to police his city. “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said.
But on Friday, in a post on X, Benioff reversed his position, writing, “I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco. My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused.”
Benioff has for years had a reputation in San Francisco as one of the city’s more progressive billionaires. In 2018, he pushed a new business tax in the city that would generate money to fight homelessness. But like many other tech executives, he has moved to the right over the past several years.
Benioff is also a longtime friend of Elon Musk, and in December, he endorsed Musk’s ideas for the Trump administration as having “great vision.”
In recent days, other tech leaders in San Francisco publicly asked Trump to hold off. They included Garry Tan, CEO of the tech startup incubator Y Combinator, who wrote on X that Trump should give the city’s elected leaders a chance. “SF is on the way to resurgence and there is a lot more to be done, but Mayor Lurie and DA Jenkins are doing the work,” Tan wrote. “Let them cook.”
NBC News reached out to Salesforce, Nvidia and Tan for comment.
Lurie, a Democrat, was elected last year with backing from many tech executives and investors. Brooke Jenkins, the district attorney, was appointed in 2022 to succeed progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin after voters recalled Boudin from office.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at the White House that “the president is willing to work with anyone across the aisle, across the country, to do the right thing and clean up America’s cities.”
“He is genuinely interested in this effort to make our streets safer, to make our cities safe and clean again. And he heard from the mayor last night who told him that he is going to earnestly try to make his city better on his own. The President heard him out. He said, ‘OK, I’ll give you a chance. We’ll be watching. And if you need us, we are here,'” she added.
In a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said, “We’re going to go into San Francisco at some point in the not too distant future.”
The president said the deployment would “make that a great city again. It can only be a great city if it doesn’t have crime, if it has crime, it can’t be a great city.”
He also threatened to use the Insurrection Act to justify the deployment of troops there, telling reporters, “I’m allowed, as, you know, as president, like 50% of the presidents, have used the Insurrection Act, they can use that, and everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that.”
Trump explained he wasn’t currently using the Insurrection Act because, “we’re trying to do it in a nicer manner. But we can always use the Insurrection Act if we want.”
The threats drew backlash from Democratic leaders in California and in the state’s Bay Area.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, both Democrats, threatened to sue the Trump administration over the issue earlier this week.
“The notion that the federal government can deploy troops into our cities with no justification grounded in reality, no oversight, no accountability, no respect for state sovereignty — it’s a direct assault on the rule of law,” Newsom said in a statement Tuesday.
He added, “We’re drawing a line: California will always defend the Constitution, our people, and our values from authoritarian overreach.”
Newsom wrote Tuesday in a post on X, “Sending troops to San Francisco? Do it and we’ll sue. We don’t bow to kings. We defend the Constitution.”
On Thursday, a spokesperson for Newsom said that Trump had “listened to reason” on the issue.
“Trump has finally, for once, listened to reason — and heard what we have been saying from the beginning. The Bay Area is a shining example of what makes California so special, and any attempt to erode our progress would damage the work we’ve done. We will continue to monitor for any concerns in the region as the days progress,” Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for the governor, told NBC News.
The Trump administration and California’s government are already engaged in a legal battle over the president’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year to quell protests against immigration enforcement raids in the city and surrounding areas.
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared skeptical that the president has the unreviewable power to deploy the National Guard on the streets of Los Angeles. The oral arguments in that case came after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in September that Trump illegally mobilized National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles.
Trump has also deployed the National Guard to Portland, Chicago and Washington this year.
On Monday, a federal appeals court allowed the Trump administration to continue its National Guard deployment in Oregon, over the objections of local officials.
Federal courts in Illinois have also blocked the federal government’s decision to deploy troops there, but last week the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to immediately allow for the deployment of troops in Illinois, arguing that they are needed there to protect federal agents who are conducting immigration enforcement activities.
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