Everyday People (without the PR Teams) are Saving San Francisco
You wouldn’t know it from corporate media, but there’s a mobilized, determined movement protecting San Francisco from a deepening crisis under a rising authoritarian government. Everyday people -- organizers, protestors, activists, and labor leaders -- are doing the real work of fighting back against the ethnic cleansing campaign being orchestrated by Trump, MAGA, and their tech-oligarch allies.
Meanwhile, billionaires and their politicians do their best to erase or co-opt this work. The same elites claim credit for “mitigating” the assaults on our city and its people while actually fueling it.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the whiplash over Trump’s threat to deploy the military to invade San Francisco -- a proposition so absurd, so blatantly illegal, that no reasonable mind could support it. Yet billionaires Marc Benioff and Elon Musk publicly applauded and called for it. Trump agreed, but called it off after billionaire Benioff and Mayor Lurie assured Trump they’d crack down on San Franciscans with no need for the military.
The Chronicle, big fans of Lurie’s crackdowns and appeasement of Trump, cheered the maneuvering of the elites. With their ears attuned to the political theater that sells papers, the Chronicle missed the real story -- one of continued people power and heroic resistance of San Franciscans.
The Real Story: Collective Power
The real story is nowhere to be found in the pages of the Chronicle, because it’s happening on the streets, at the courthouses, and in our neighborhoods.
The real story is how a network of ordinary San Franciscans is showing up daily at the immigration courthouse in a strategic blockade against ICE abductions. Activists are assisting families with safety escorts, moral support, and vital information. When ICE agents began abducting people outside courthouses during immigration hearings, it wasn’t billionaires who intervened -- it was regular people who showed up. And they’ve been showing up every day for months. They built a community defense network to document and resist ICE’s violence, provide information and support to immigrants attending hearings, and make it known that the community is watching.
The real story is also about SF’s progressive bar – not the drinking type, the legal type – of criminal defense and immigration lawyers who have sprung to action. Led by stellar organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, the San Francisco Immigrant Legal & Education Network, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, they’ve fought tirelessly while most politicians have looked the other way. San Francisco immigration attorneys have been filing numerous habeas corpus petitions to challenge unjust arrests -- a campaign so effective it was featured in Mission Local for its impact.
Then there are the real stories from the community organizations who have been stepping up to support immigrants with mutual aid, showing what an actual Sanctuary City looks like in action. Groups like Mission Action, Faith in Action, and many others are rising to the moment. Faith in Action, a network of faith communities, has been fighting displacement and protecting tenants, and organizing to support low income families affected by immigration detention or deportation. Latino communities are refusing to disappear and standing strong in the face of displacement and criminalization.
Bay Resistance is a coalition of grassroots organizations that formed in the wake of Trump’s first election, and they have mobilized thousands of San Franciscans to defend immigrants, workers, and people experiencing homelessness from state violence and right-wing attacks. The Democratic Socialist of America and a group known on social media as The Penguins have been relentlessly mobilizing at the courthouse. The Brass Liberation Orchestra has shown up repeatedly to fire everyone up with music. Meanwhile, our friends at Indivisible have been organizing mass marches, as have the folks at the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The amount of activism has been inspiring and it will continue to grow.
Ordinary San Franciscans have built a system of safety and solidarity so strong that it has forced ICE to back down. For six weeks straight, ICE halted its courthouse operations because it was outnumbered outside and outlitigated inside.
Real Safety Comes from Safety
The ultra-wealthy can continue to weaponize “public safety” (despite historically low crime rates) to grow their power and continue their class warfare on the poor by criminalizing poverty, increasing surveillance, and stifling dissent. But that has never stopped the Bay Area and it won’t now. The working class is always in crisis under capitalism, and it’s far worse now than it’s been in a long time. When regular people can’t rely on the government for support, they rely on each other, and that is exactly what is happening now.
Real safety doesn't come from more criminalization, surveillance, or pushing poor people out of sight, it comes from solidarity in the form of organizers protesting ICE, tenants forming unions and defending their homes, and community networks feeding and housing each other when the social safety net is threadbare. Real safety and stability have always come from solidarity, not oligarchy, and this is how the working class will win.
Credit the People and Help Do the Work
It’s time to stop praising the billionaires who destabilize our neighborhoods, enable the right wing, and support the repression of immigrants and protesters, and start recognizing and uplifting the communities and everyday people who are actually holding San Francisco together.
If you want to defend your city and protect your neighbors, don’t wait for politicians and rich tech CEOs to act -- join any of the groups mentioned above and continue the long legacy of solidarity movements in the Bay Area.