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 tackle crime. Instead, his administration has quietly phased out law enforcement, 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 as of Nov. 1 of this year fell 40% from the same period in 2024, marking the sharpest retreat anywhere in the United States from prosecuting drug traffickers, gun criminals and other accused lawbreakers, according to a Reuters finding of more than 15 million court records.
The number of people charged with drug violations fell by nearly 50 percent to 137, according to a Reuters analysis.
Instead, federal agents who once made those cases are now rounding up to deporting immigrants, taking with them one of the most powerful tools to combat everything from drug trafficking to gun violence, nine current and former federal officials familiar with the changes said. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the department’s work.
“They don’t have agents to do criminal cases,” said a former Justice Department official.
That dramatic pullback came after Trump described the city under its Democratic leadership as “destroyed” and a “mess” and insisted it needed federal help to turn it around.
As recently as October, Trump promised a crackdown on the city and began assembling a force of immigration officials and other agents to raid San Francisco to arrest immigrants and try to crack down on 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 that area called” and asked him not to go ahead.
The Trump administration has launched the most sweeping overhaul of federal law enforcement in a decade, freeing up thousands of agents to focus on immigration. That change affected the government’s ability to prosecute people for almost anything.
San Francisco is not alone in seeing a recession. The number of people charged with federal drug crimes fell 10% nationwide this year to the lowest point in at least three decades as the Trump administration shifted agents and lawyers to focus on immigration, Reuters reported in September.
The slowdown has been most pronounced in San Francisco, a city whose liberal leanings have made it a target for conservative administrations, Reuters found after examining federal court records.
Craig Misakian, the U.S. attorney for Northern California, which includes San Francisco, said in a statement that the drop in the number of prosecutions there “has many reasons that cannot be explained by the current statistics alone.” He declined to comment on what they were.
Misakian said “there is a natural ebb and flow in the volume of drug prosecutions” and that his office “has made drug enforcement a high priority.”
“Criminal illegal aliens now being apprehended and removed from the country include terrorists, human traffickers, drug traffickers, and others who participate in or organize high-level, coordinated crimes,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, but did not comment specifically on the 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 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 branch of Thomson Reuters.
The news agency compared the number of people charged with crimes between January 1 and November 1 to the same period last year. In some cases, Reuters used artificial intelligence to help categorize the charges people faced. A review of a random set of records showed its assessments to be 98% accurate.
Those records show that nearly 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 Nov. 1, down from 575 in the same period last year and the lowest number of cases in at least two decades. That backlog includes federal courts in San Francisco as well as Oakland and San Jose.
Federal charges are an especially powerful tool for fighting crime because they often come with lengthy prison terms. “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 addressing homelessness.
But the city police? “They laugh at them. The dealers aren’t afraid of them at all,” Wolf said, because an arrest in state court often means a quick return to the streets.
A federal crackdown
The Trump administration’s pushback comes less than two years after the Justice Department launched a crackdown on drug dealing in San Francisco — one of America’s wealthiest cities thanks to being a hub for the tech economy. After civic leaders and even judges complained that the streets no longer seemed safe, the effort continued, but court records show its pace slowed sharply.
At first, federal agents in the city worked with local detectives to buy drugs and arrest dealers. At other times, they would monitor and bust drug deals.
To act as a deterrent, prosecutors randomly selected days on which they would charge almost all dealers caught in a certain neighborhood in federal court instead of state court, meaning they would face stiffer sentences if convicted.
The crackdown was centered on the city’s Tenderloin district, a roughly 50-square block in the middle of the city where, day and night, people gather on narrow sidewalks to sell and use drugs.
City leaders credited the crackdown with driving many drug dealers off street corners during the day, even though they reappear at night.
‘It’s hard to do’
Removing a dealer is one thing. Ferreting high-level networks is a very intensive undertaking, often requiring wire taps and around-the-clock monitoring. And it’s hard to muster agents to do the job when so many are sidelined by immigration fees, five current and former officials said.
“These things take constant effort and if you’re being pulled in different directions, it’s hard to do,” said a former official.
The Justice Department disputed that effect. “Assisting our partners with immigration enforcement does not impede our ability to successfully investigate and prosecute other types of crimes to keep American citizens safe,” said spokeswoman Natalie Baldassare.
The decline in federal drug enforcement in San Francisco was previously reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, but the full extent of the government’s retreat from fighting crime in Northern California has not been previously documented.
The Trump administration’s policing pullbacks have touched almost every type of federal crime-fighting activity in San Francisco, Reuters found after examining court records. The number of people charged with violating gun laws dropped 40 percent to 42 between January and early November compared to the same month in 2024.
But it is most pronounced for the types of cases the US government has long used to target high-level criminals, such as traffickers who flood San Francisco with the powerful and cheap fentanyl. The government has indicted 32 people on drug conspiracy charges in Northern California this year, down from 89 in the same period last year, court records show, a drop of nearly two-thirds.
“I know a few weeks ago, the DEA came and hit the streets. And this is the first time I’ve seen them pick people up in a long time,” said Omar Ward, who describes the city’s public drug use online under the pseudonym JJ Smith.
A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration did not respond to questions about that claim.
The federal pullback comes at a particularly challenging time for San Francisco because its own police force is already under strain. A wave of departures in recent years has left the department about 500 officers short, about a quarter of its total staff. The guards complain about the overcrowding in the prison.
“We welcome the assistance we have received,” said department spokesman Evan Cernofsky. “The feds have been incredibly helpful, but what any other law enforcement agency is doing is really up to them.”
Cities and lethargy
San Francisco has less violent crime than most major US cities. But illegal drugs — and fentanyl in particular — have cut a deadly path in the community, killing more than 3,200 people in the past five years, according to the city’s medical examiner’s report.
On a recent afternoon, people smoked and injected on the sidewalks of the Tenderloin neighborhood, a few blocks from San Francisco’s federal courthouse. Some were slumped over in folding chairs or collapsed on the sidewalk. As the sun set, a knot of young men carrying backpacks shouted “black and white” warnings as a police cruiser approached, and crept closer behind a parked car.
San Francisco’s drug problem shows no sign of abating.
The city’s medical examiner said 497 people had died from accidental drug overdoses through the end of September, three-quarters of them from fentanyl. Last year, 507 people died from January to September.
The local police is making up some of the deficit. 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, compared with 1,310 in the same period a year earlier, 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 neighboring cities, including San Francisco and Oakland.
But local police don’t seem to be doing enough, said Jason Finau, senior director of health at the Glide Foundation, which provides services to addicts. “Even with the police here, it hasn’t stopped people from coming here, dealing and using openly,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Matt McKnight; Editing by Michael Lermanth)
