By Brad Heath
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 2 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump vowed this year to flood San Francisco with federal agents – and even soldiers – to crack down on crime. Instead, his administration has quietly taken law enforcement away, leaving the city with less help to fight its deadly drug crisis.
The number of people charged with federal crimes in San Francisco and surrounding cities through November 1 of this year plunged 40% from the same period of 2024, one of the most abrupt retreats from prosecuting drug traffickers, gun criminals and other accused lawbreakers anywhere in the United States, a Reuters examination of more than 15 million federal court records found.
The number of people charged with violating drug laws dropped even further, by about 50%, to 137, according to Reuters’ analysis.
Instead, federal agents who once built those cases are now rounding up immigrants to deport, taking away one of the most potent tools for combatting everything from drug trafficking to gun violence, nine current and former federal officials familiar with the changes said. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the department’s work.
“They just don’t have the agents to do criminal cases,” a former Justice Department official said.
That dramatic pullback happened even as Trump described the city under its Democratic leadership as “destroyed” and “a mess,” and insisted that it needed federal help to turn around.
As recently as October, Trump promised a crackdown in the city and began assembling a force of immigration officers and other agents to storm into San Francisco to arrest migrants and try to tackle other crimes, as the government has done in Washington, D.C. and Memphis. Trump said in a social media post that he called it off after “friends of mine who live in the area called” and urged him not to go forward.
The Trump administration has launched the broadest overhaul of federal law enforcement in a decade, diverting thousands of agents to focus on immigration instead. That shift has taken a toll on the government’s ability to prosecute people for almost everything else.
San Francisco is not alone in seeing a slowdown. The number of people charged with federal drug crimes has fallen about 10% nationwide this year to the lowest point in at least three decades as the Trump administration diverted agents and attorneys to focus on immigration, Reuters reported in September.
The slowdown has been among the most pronounced in San Francisco, a city whose liberal tilt has made it a target for the conservative administration, Reuters found after examining federal court records.
Craig Missakian, the U.S. attorney in northern California, which includes San Francisco, said in a statement that the drop in the number of prosecutions there had “many contributing causes that the statistics alone do not explain.” He declined to comment on what they are.
Missakian said “there is a natural ebb and flow to the volume of drug prosecution” and that his office “has made drug enforcement a top priority.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said “the criminal illegal aliens now being arrested and removed from the country include terrorists, human traffickers, drug smugglers, and others participating in or organizing high-level, coordinated crimes” but did not comment specifically on activities in San Francisco in response to Reuters’ questions. The Justice Department also denied that its focus on immigration has impacted its other work.
Reuters examined the extent of the Justice Department’s pullback by gathering the dockets of every publicly available federal criminal case 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. In some cases, Reuters used artificial intelligence to help classify the charges people faced. A review of a random set of records showed its assessments to be 98% accurate.
Those records show that almost every type of federal criminal enforcement has collapsed in northern California this year.
The Justice Department brought criminal charges against 355 people in northern California as of November 1, down from 575 during the same period last year and the lowest number of cases in at least two decades. That slowdown includes the federal courts in San Francisco as well as Oakland and San Jose.
Federal charges are a particularly powerful tool for combatting crime because they often come with longer prison sentences. “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 tackling homelessness.
But city police? “They laugh at them. The dealers are not afraid of them at all,” Wolf said, because an arrest routed to state court often means a quick return to the street.
A FEDERAL CRACKDOWN
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 U.S. thanks largely to being a hub of the tech economy. Driven by complaints by civic leaders and even judges that the streets no longer seemed safe, the effort has continued, but court records show its pace has slowed sharply.
Initially, federal agents in the city worked with local detectives to buy drugs undercover and arrest the dealers. At other times, they surveilled drug deals and pounced.
To act as a deterrent, prosecutors randomly selected days on which they would charge nearly all the dealers arrested in certain neighborhoods in federal court instead of state court, meaning that if they were convicted they faced harsher punishments.
The crackdown was concentrated in the city’s Tenderloin district, roughly 50 square blocks in the center of the city where, day and night, people clustered on the narrow sidewalks to sell and use drugs.
City leaders credited the crackdown with driving many of the drug dealers off of street corners during the daytime, though they still re-emerge at night.
‘HARD TO MAKE IT HAPPEN’
Removing the dealers is one thing. Ferreting out the higher-level networks is a far more intensive undertaking, often requiring wiretaps and hours of surveillance. And it’s harder to muster the agents to do that work when so many have been sidelined by immigration duties, five current and former officials said.
“These things take persistent effort and if you’re being pulled in different directions, it’s hard to make it happen,” a former official said.
The Justice Department disputed that impact. “Assisting our partners with immigration enforcement has not deterred our ability to also successfully investigate and prosecute other types of crime to keep American citizens safe,” spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre said.
The falloff in federal drug enforcement in San Francisco has been previously reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, but the full magnitude of the government’s retreat from fighting crime in northern California has not previously been documented.
The Trump administration’s policing pullback has touched almost every kind of federal crime-fighting activity in San Francisco, Reuters found after examining court records. The number of people charged with violating gun laws between January and the beginning of November dropped by 40%, to 42, compared to the same months in 2024.
But it has been most pronounced for the types of cases the U.S. government has long used to target higher-level criminals like the traffickers who flooded San Francisco with potent and inexpensive fentanyl. The government has charged 32 people with drug conspiracies in northern California so far this year, down from 89 in the same period last year, a drop of about two-thirds, court records show.
“I know like about a few weeks ago, the DEA came and hit the streets. And that was the first time I’ve seen them pick people up in a long time,” said Omar Ward, who chronicles the city’s public drug use online under the pseudonym J.J. Smith.
A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration did not respond to questions about that claim.
The federal pullback comes at an especially challenging time for San Francisco because its own police force is already under strain. A wave of departures in recent years left the department short almost 500 officers, about a quarter of its total staffing. Guards have complained that its jails have become overcrowded.
“We welcome the help we get,” Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesperson for the department said. “The feds have been incredibly helpful, but whatever any other law enforcement agency is doing is really up to them.”
THE CITY AND THE SLOWDOWN
San Francisco has less violent crime than most major U.S. cities. But illegal drugs – and fentanyl in particular – have cut a deadly path through the community, killing more than 3,200 people over the past five years, according to reports by the city’s medical examiner.
On a recent afternoon, people smoked and injected themselves on the sidewalks in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a few blocks from San Francisco’s federal courthouse. A few slumped across folding chairs or were crumpled on the sidewalk. As the sun set, a knot of young men, one carrying a backpack, warned “black and white” as a police cruiser approached, and clustered more closely behind a parked car.
There is little sign San Francisco’s drug problem is ebbing.
The city’s medical examiner reported that 497 people had died from accidental drug overdoses through the end of September, three-quarters of them because of fentanyl. Last year, 507 people died between January and September.
Local police are filling some of the gap. The number of drug arrests by local police in San Francisco increased about 20% in the first 10 months of the year, to about 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 anti-crime teams to San Francisco and neighboring cities, including Oakland.
But local police don’t seem sufficient, said Jason Finau, the senior health director for the Glide Foundation, which provides services to addicts. “Even with the police here, that has not deterred the folks from being here, dealing, and using openly,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Matt McKnight; Editing by Michael Learmonth)
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