Trump floats San Francisco as next target for crime crackdown

Lauren Dezenski, Bloomberg News on Oct 15, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said his administration would look to San Francisco as the next target of his federal crime crackdown, which has been mostly directed at Democrat-run cities.

“I’m going to be strongly recommending at the request of government officials, which is always nice, that you start looking at San Francisco,” Trump said during a White House event on Wednesday, joined by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I think we can make San Francisco — there’s one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Now it’s a mess, and we have great support in San Francisco.”

Trump’s comments come as San Francisco’s crime rates have fallen in recent months. The city is on track to see the fewest homicides since the 1950s. Property crimes, like car break-ins, which spiked during the pandemic and tarnished the city’s image, have also dropped dramatically.

“I am clear-eyed about the challenges that we have,” San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said Wednesday at a press conference prior to Trump’s comments. “We have a lot of work to do. But I trust our local law enforcement.” Lurie’s office declined to comment on Trump’s statement.

Trump has moved to deploy U.S. troops and federal law enforcement officials to major cities to target crime and counter demonstrations against his deportations of undocumented migrants even in the face of legal challenges. Trump has deployed or attempted to send National Guard personnel to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Chicago and Portland, claiming that Democratic state and local officials have failed to protect citizens and allowed violence to spiral out of control.

California State Senator Scott Wiener, whose district includes San Francisco, denounced Trump’s threat to send federal forces to the city, saying no local officials had requested such an intervention.

“San Francisco neither needs nor wants Trump’s personal army on our streets,” he wrote on X. “We don’t need Trump’s authoritarian crackdown in our city. Bottom line: Stay the hell out of San Francisco.”

Critics have accused Trump of exaggerating the threat and in Washington cast the deployments as a public relations exercise in a city where violent crime has fallen from post-pandemic highs. The Portland and Chicago deployments are currently facing legal challenges, but Trump has repeatedly floated expanding his efforts. The Los Angeles deployment was ruled unconstitutional earlier this year by a judge.

“Over the past few months, FBI officers in all 50 states made crushing violent crime a top enforcement priority. That’s what they did, rounding up and arresting thousands of the most violent and dangerous criminals,” Trump said.

The president said that the effort was carried out “in many cities that people didn’t know about. We kept it a little quiet, and it had a big impact.”

According to Trump, the FBI arrested over 8,000 violent criminals during the operation in major cities, including 725 individuals wanted for violent crimes against children and murderers.

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(With assistance from Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Eliyahu Kamisher and Derek Wallbank.)

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