Were it not for a last-minute reversal by President Trump, brokered in secret by a couple of billionaires and SF's mayor, San Francisco and Oakland could have easily descended into the same violent chaos, provoked by an ICE invasion, that we're seeing in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration has, since Trump took office this second shameful time, been working their way down a list of enemy states and cities where federal agents have been sent in on a draconian mission to arrest as many Latino people as possible. This same kind of aggression isn't happening in Republican-leaning Texas or Florida, which also have huge numbers of undocumented immigrants. But it's happening in the places that largely aren't grateful for Trump being in the White House: Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and now Minneapolis.

San Francisco and the Bay Area have seen a modicum of ICE activity since early last year, and some small protests have broken out around ICE's headquarters and the immigration court on Sansome Street. But we haven't seen anything like the continued, vengeful onslaught of masked federal agents that Minneapolis — a city about half the size of San Francisco, with a much smaller immigrant community — has seen over the last two months.

The federal government doesn't have the resources to conduct such an onslaught everywhere all at once, and ICE agents have been moving, at Trump's whim, from locale to locale — with an aggressive hiring push that has reportedly added 12,000 new ICE agents to the training rolls in the last four months.

It's easy to see how San Francisco escaped the crosshairs by mere hours back in October, in some late-night conversations Trump reportedly had with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SF Mayor Daniel Lurie, not necessarily in that order. With 100 federal border patrol agents reportedly set to begin staging for a "surge" at a Coast Guard base in Alameda on Thursday, October 23, and some unknown number of ICE agents likely to follow them, these men got the president on the phone and convinced him to call off his goons.

We don't know what was said exactly in the Lurie phone call — Lurie told us that Thursday morning only that he'd spoken to Trump and told him "San Francisco is on the rise" and "the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong." — and there may be some pending legal action to get a transcript of the phone call.

But seeing what has unfolded in Minneapolis, with ICE perhaps learning new tactics since its "surge" last June in Los Angeles, it is easy to imagine that we could have seen similar bloodshed of innocent protesters, if not far worse, should the battle have come to the Bay Area in October.

Minneapolis residents still have the George Floyd protests of 2020 fresh in their memory, but the Bay Area has an even deeper and longer tradition of protest and the anarchic, mostly message-free chaos that can accompany it, to which a federal brigade would likely react with increasing escalation.

As Minneapolis Chief of Police Brian O'Hara told the New York Times' Daily podcast following the murder of Renee Good, Minneapolis police have been working for the last five years to regain the public's trust, and to train heavily in de-escalation techniques. And here you have federal agents, many of them clearly poorly trained, with zero sense of how to de-escalate fraught situations.

That point was proven again on Saturday with the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by an ICE agent, in a chaotic scuffle in which agents appeared to have fired their weapons indiscriminately, all after one of them shouted about Pretti having a weapon — which video shows he did not touch.

Even without Trump's "surge" kicking off here in the Bay Area, a day of scant protest ended in a bizarre and also chaotic scene outside the Coast Guard base in Alameda, in which Coast Guard security personnel fired shots at a U-Haul that was driving toward them in the area of the protest — and the full details of what prompted this situation remain unclear. Two people, including the U-Haul driver, were injured in the incident.

The point being, when tensions are high, when armed agents are involved, and when impassioned individuals start expressing their passions in the face of those armed agents, the guns quickly come out, and people can get hurt. People also get hurt simply because situations become volatile, or confusing, and untrained officers resort to using guns.

Many, many people foresaw the terrible outcomes if that surge had gone forward in the Bay Area, and even activists were trying to warn each other to remain calm and keep from getting hurt. Chances are, if it were here, it would have been uglier, and bloodier.

And there is nothing keeping the administration from turning their attention back here, and to California generally — especially when Governor Gavin Newsom makes his 2028 presidential campaign official and starts grabbing more of the spotlight. So we should all take heed from Minneapolis and prepare ourselves, just in case.

The Trump administration will, in the way of fascists, continue to try to blame the protesters, blame Democrats, and cast ICE agents as heroes. Keep using your own eyes and ears, though. Keep telling your Trump-voting relatives to use theirs. This is all far from over.

Top image: Demonstrators protests ICE operations and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on January 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pretti, an ICU nurse at a VA medical center, died yesterday after being shot multiple times during a brief altercation with border patrol agents in the Eat Street district of Minneapolis. Good was killed by an ICE agent on January 7. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)