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The White House was preparing on Wednesday to dispatch numerous of federal agents to the northern California for a significant immigration enforcement operation, triggering outrage from California leaders.

Details of the Mission

Details of the operation were continuing to unfold, but it will allegedly feature more than 100 government officers, based on information. The personnel are scheduled to begin occupying the military installation in the East Bay, facing San Francisco. It remained unclear whether state soldiers would also be involved.

Government Backlash

The operation follows months of statements by the president to focus on the progressive municipality. The state's leader Gavin Newsom condemned the move, describing it as “straight from the authoritarian playbook”.

“He dispatches masked men, he dispatches Border Patrol, he dispatches ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can take credit for handling that by dispatching the military forces,” the governor stated. “This mirrors the firestarter fighting the inferno.”

Municipal Preparation

San Francisco is the newest major city singled out by Donald Trump’s campaign of mass immigration arrests. The deployment is anticipated to provoke a showdown between the federal government and city officials who have committed to block armed border control in the city.

San Franciscans have been readying for months for Trump to carry out repeated threats to send troops to the city. At a Wednesday afternoon press conference, San Francisco’s municipal chief emphasized that the city was equipped.

“During this period, we have been preparing for the possibility of some kind of national intervention in our city,” said the mayor, noting that he had enacted new policies on Wednesday to “bolster the city’s protection of our immigrant communities, and guarantee our agencies are organized prior to any federal deployment.”

Legal Context

Regardless of court battles to missions in a multiple urban areas, including Illinois, Portland and Southern California, Trump has asserted “absolute authority” to deploy the state troops in cities, referencing the federal statute which allows presidents certain rights to deploy troops on domestic land.

Local Response

Newsom – who previously served as San Francisco’s mayor – had vowed to take action “right away” to a deployment in the city. “The notion that the national administration can send forces into our cities with no justification grounded in reality, no oversight, no responsibility, no respect for state sovereignty – it constitutes an attack on the legal system,” he said on Wednesday.

Local organizations, including advocacy organizations established during the first Trump administration, have organized to swiftly gather a mass rally in the city, as well as peaceful assemblies at public spaces.

Local Impact

In San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, a mostly Latin American neighborhood, elected official told reporters last week she and her voters had been bracing for this time. “The moment that people stop going to work, when minority individuals cannot move about freely without the apprehension of national personnel racially profiling and arresting them, the moment when parents stop sending kids to school, become too afraid to go to the grocery store or physician,” she said. “The readiness efforts in the Mission is essentially a shutdown the extent of which we haven’t seen since the health crisis.”

National Guard Status

Approximately 300 out of several thousand regional state soldiers continue under national command under an order from Trump. Roughly several hundred of them had been transferred to the Pacific Northwest, where they were waiting in limbo amid a court case over their mission.

This time, Newsom said he had summoned the local soldiers under his authority to staff charity kitchens throughout the administrative stoppage.