Trump promised a San Francisco crime crackdown. His administration did the opposite

By Brad Heath

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 2 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to flood San Francisco this year with federal agents and even soldiers to fight crime. Instead, his administration quietly dismantled law enforcement, leaving the city with less help in combating its deadly drug crisis.

By Nov. 1 of this year, there was a 40% drop in the number of people charged with federal crimes in San Francisco and surrounding cities compared to the same period in 2024, a Reuters review of more than 15 million federal court records found. It was one of the most sudden setbacks in prosecutions of drug traffickers, gun criminals and other law-breaking defendants anywhere in the United States.

The number of people accused of violating drug laws fell further, dropping nearly 50% to 137, according to a Reuters analysis.

Instead, federal agents who once created these cases are now rounding up immigrants for deportation, taking away one of the most powerful tools to combat everything from drug trafficking to gun violence, said nine current and former federal officials familiar with the changes. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the department’s work.

“They don’t have agents to prosecute criminal cases,” said a former Justice Department official.

The dramatic retreat came despite Trump describing the city under Democratic leadership as “devastated” and a “mess” and insisting it needed federal aid to recover.

As recently as October, Trump vowed a crackdown on the city and began assembling a force of immigration officers and other agents to rush into San Francisco to detain immigrants and fight other crimes as the government did in Washington, D.C., and Memphis. Trump said in a social media post that he canceled after “a call from my friends who live in the area” and urged him not to go forward.

The Trump administration has launched the most sweeping overhaul of federal law enforcement in a decade, shifting the attention of thousands of agents to immigration. This change has negatively impacted the government’s ability to sue people on almost anything.

San Francisco isn’t the only country experiencing a slowdown. The number of people charged with federal drug crimes has fallen nearly 10 percent nationwide this year, to the lowest point in at least three decades, as the Trump administration focuses agents and lawyers on immigration, Reuters reported in September.

The slowdown was among the most pronounced in San Francisco, whose liberal leaning has made it a target for a conservative administration, a Reuters review of federal court records found.

Craig Missakian, the U.S. attorney in Northern California, which includes San Francisco, said in a statement that the drop in prosecutions there was due to “many contributing causes that statistics alone cannot explain.” He declined to comment on what they were.

Missakian said there is a “natural ebb and flow in the volume of drug investigations” and that his office “makes the fight against drugs a top priority.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said “criminal illegal aliens currently apprehended and removed include terrorists, human smugglers, drug smugglers and others who participate in or organize high-level, coordinated crimes,” but did not comment specifically on activities in San Francisco in response to questions from Reuters. The Justice Department also denied that its focus on immigration affected its other work.

Reuters examined the extent of the Justice Department’s retreat by collecting records of all publicly available federal criminal cases since the 1990s from Westlaw, an online legal research service that is a division of Thomson Reuters.

The news agency compared the number of people charged with crimes between January 1 and November 1 with the same period in previous years. Reuters in some cases artificial intelligence to help classify the charges people face. Examination of a random set of records showed that their assessments were 98% accurate.

These records show that nearly every form of federal criminal enforcement has collapsed in Northern California this year.

The Department of Justice filed criminal charges against 355 people in Northern California as of Nov. 1; That’s down from 575 in the same period last year, the lowest number of cases in at least two decades. The slowdown includes federal courts in San Francisco, as well as Oakland and San Jose.

Federal charges are a particularly powerful tool in fighting crime because they often come with longer prison sentences. “The dealers are 100% afraid of the feds,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict who advocates for treatment with Rescue SF, a citywide coalition aimed at combating homelessness.

But the city police? “They laugh at them. The dealers are not afraid of them at all,” Wolf said, because an arrest sent to state court often meant a quick return to the streets.

A FEDERAL CONFLICT

The Trump administration’s retreat began less than two years after the Justice Department launched a crackdown on drug dealing in San Francisco, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States largely because it is the center of the tech economy. The effort continued amid complaints from civic leaders and even judges that the streets no longer appeared safe, but court records show the pace slowed sharply.

Initially, federal agents in the city worked with local detectives to make undercover drug purchases and arrest dealers. Other times they surveilled and attacked drug deals.

To act as a deterrent, prosecutors randomly selected the days on which they would try almost all of the dealers arrested in certain neighborhoods in federal rather than state court; this meant they would face harsher penalties if found guilty.

The crackdown was concentrated in the approximately 50-block Tenderloin district in the city’s core; Here people gather on narrow sidewalks day and night to sell and use drugs.

City leaders credit the crackdown with removing most drug dealers from street corners during the day, although they reappear at night.

‘IT IS HARD TO REALIZE’

Removing vendors is one thing. Uncovering high-level networks is a much more intensive undertaking, often requiring wiretapping and hours of surveillance. It’s harder to assemble agents to do the job when so many people are suspended from immigration duties, five current and former officials said.

“These things require persistent effort, and that’s hard to do if you’re being pulled in different directions,” one former official said.

The Ministry of Justice objected to this effect. “Assisting our partners with immigration enforcement has not hindered our ability to successfully investigate and prosecute other types of crimes to keep American citizens safe,” spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre said.

The decline in federal drug enforcement in San Francisco was previously reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, but the extent of the government’s retreat from fighting crime in Northern California had not previously been documented.

After reviewing court records, Reuters found that the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the police force affected nearly every federal crime-fighting activity in San Francisco. Between January and early November, the number of people accused of violating gun laws dropped by 40% to 42, compared with the same months in 2024.

But it’s most pronounced for the types of cases the U.S. government has long used to target high-level criminals, like the traffickers who flood San Francisco with potent, cheap fentanyl. The government has charged 32 people with drug conspiracies in Northern California this year, according to court records; In the same period last year, this number was 89; this number is a decrease of approximately two-thirds.

“I know a couple weeks ago the DEA came in and took to the streets. It’s the first time I’ve seen them round up people in a long time,” said Omar Ward, who chronicles the city’s public drug use online under the pseudonym JJ Smith.

A Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman did not respond to questions about this claim.

The federal pullback comes at a particularly challenging time for San Francisco because its own police force is already under pressure. A wave of departures in recent years has left the department without nearly 500 officers, about a quarter of the total staff. Guards complained that prisons were overcrowded.

“We welcome the assistance we received,” said Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesman for the department. “The feds have been incredibly helpful, but what other law enforcement agencies do is really up to them.”

CITY AND SLOW DOWN

Violent crime is lower in San Francisco than in most major US cities. But illegal drugs — particularly fentanyl — have wreaked a deadly havoc in society, killing more than 3,200 people in the past five years, according to reports from the city’s medical examiner.

On recent days, people smoked and injected themselves on the sidewalks in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a few blocks from San Francisco’s federal courthouse. A few collapsed on folding chairs or crumpled onto the pavement. As the sun set, a group of young men, one carrying a backpack, shouted a “black and white” warning as a police cruiser approached and moved closer behind a parked car.

There are few signs that San Francisco’s drug problem is abating.

The city’s medical examiner reported that 497 people had died of accidental drug overdoses by the end of September, three-quarters of whom died from fentanyl. Between January and September last year, 507 people lost their lives.

Local police are filling some of that gap. The number of drug arrests by local police in San Francisco rose nearly 20% in the first 10 months of the year, to nearly 1,600 from 1,310 in the same period the year before, according to records from the city’s district attorney. This fall, Gavin Newsom ordered the state Highway Patrol to send more crime-fighting squads to San Francisco and neighboring cities, including Oakland.

But Jason Finau, senior health director at the Glide Foundation, which provides services to addicts, said local police appeared inadequate. “Even though the police were here, that didn’t stop people from being here, trading and openly using,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Matt McKnight; Editing by Michael Learmonth)