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The White House appeared poised on Wednesday to send dozens of law enforcement personnel to the northern California for a major immigration enforcement operation, triggering condemnation from state officials.

Information of the Mission

Details of the operation were continuing to unfold, but it will reportedly include approximately 100+ law enforcement personnel, based on information. The personnel are scheduled to begin using the Coast Guard facility in Alameda, opposite San Francisco. It was not confirmed whether state soldiers would also be involved.

Official Response

The operation follows an extended period of warnings by the administration to focus on the progressive municipality. The state's leader Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, describing it as “taken directly from the dictator’s handbook”.

“He dispatches masked men, he deploys customs officers, he dispatches immigration officials, he creates concern and apprehension in the community so that he can lay claim for handling that by deploying the state troops,” the governor stated. “This mirrors the arsonist extinguishing the blaze.”

City Preparation

San Francisco is the most recent major city targeted by the administration's initiative of widespread apprehensions. The mission is anticipated to provoke a showdown between the federal government and local leaders who have vowed to block militarized immigration enforcement in the city.

San Franciscans have been gearing up for weeks for Trump to carry out repeated threats to dispatch personnel to the city. At a Wednesday afternoon press conference, San Francisco’s city leader emphasized that the city was equipped.

“Over recent weeks, we have been preparing for the possibility of some kind of national intervention in our city,” stated the official, explaining that he had enacted new policies on Wednesday to “bolster the city’s support for our immigrant communities, and ensure our departments are coordinated before any national intervention.”

Judicial Background

Regardless of judicial disputes to deployments in a number of cities, including Chicago, Portland and Southern California, Trump has asserted “absolute authority” to deploy the military forces in cities, citing the presidential authority which allows presidents specific authority to dispatch personnel on domestic land.

Community Response

The governor, who once held office as San Francisco’s city leader – had committed to take action “right away” to a mission in the city. “The idea that the federal government can deploy troops into our cities with no justification grounded in reality, no monitoring, no accountability, no consideration of local authority – it constitutes an attack on the legal system,” he said on Wednesday.

Community groups, including social justice nonprofits formed in the first Trump administration, have prepped to quickly mobilize a mass rally in the city, as well as peaceful assemblies at public spaces.

Community Consequences

In San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, a predominantly Latino neighborhood, local representative stated to media last week she and her constituents had been preparing for this time. “The time that people stop going to work, when minority individuals are afraid to go outdoors without the apprehension of Trump’s federal agents discriminating against and detaining them, the time when students avoid classrooms, grow too frightened to go to the grocery store or doctor,” she said. “Our ongoing preparations in the Mission is essentially a halt the extent of which we haven’t seen since the health crisis.”

State Troops Status

Roughly 300 out of several thousand California military personnel stay under federal control under an order from Trump. Roughly two hundred of them had been sent to Oregon, where they were staying in standby in the midst of a court case over their deployment.

This week, Newsom said he had called the local soldiers under his command to manage charity kitchens amid the federal closure.