The San Francisco Irony: When a ‘Crackdown’ Becomes a Cold Shoulder
During his time in office, President Donald Trump often spoke of a determined, federal-led “crackdown” on crime, especially in major cities run by Democrats. San Francisco, with its liberal policies and status as a “sanctuary city,” was frequently placed directly in the administration’s crosshairs. However, a closer look at the actual federal actions taken against the Golden Gate City reveals an astonishing irony: the administration’s efforts arguably did the very opposite of launching a cooperative crime crackdown.
The entire dynamic was dominated not by a focus on murders or property theft, but by a highly charged political battle over immigration. Almost immediately after President Trump took office in 2017, his administration issued executive orders threatening to yank federal funding from cities designated as “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants.
San Francisco, a city that had implemented its sanctuary policies decades earlier, suddenly found itself on the brink of losing billions. The city attorney’s office estimated that the federal government was threatening to withhold more than $1.2 billion in funding per year. This wasn’t just crime-fighting money; a large portion of the funding was designated for critical services like health care, nutrition, and other programs that benefit the poor and vulnerable.
Instead of dispatching the FBI or Department of Justice to work hand-in-hand with the San Francisco Police Department on narcotics or gang activity, the administration chose a punitive approach. The threat to strip a city of over a billion dollars in its budget is hardly a strategy to launch a “crackdown” designed to make the streets safer.
Local leaders argued that the federal tactics were a clear case of political coercion. Their position, repeatedly upheld in court, was that the federal government could not force local police to act as federal immigration agents. In fact, San Francisco officials asserted that their sanctuary policies actually helped public safety by ensuring that all residents, regardless of immigration status, would be willing to report crimes to the local police without fear of deportation.
The ensuing legal fight quickly became a major roadblock to any form of constructive federal-local law enforcement collaboration. San Francisco was the first city to sue the Trump administration over the executive order, and a federal judge ultimately blocked the administration from withholding the money. In a significant win for the city, an appeals court later ruled in 2018 that the president had overstepped his authority with the funding threat.
The administration’s primary “action” against San Francisco was not a surge of crime-fighting resources, but a sustained, legally challenged attempt to cut off a major chunk of the city’s financial lifeline as a penalty for its sanctuary status. By prioritizing a punitive political dispute over immigration policy, the federal government essentially created an environment of confrontation, undermining the very local cooperation needed for any actual, non-political crime crackdown to succeed.