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The White House appeared poised on Wednesday to send numerous of federal agents to the Bay Area region for a significant immigration enforcement operation, prompting outrage from state officials.

Details of the Mission

Details of the operation were continuing to unfold, but it will reportedly include more than 100 government officers, according to reports. The agents are scheduled to begin utilizing the military installation in across the bay, facing San Francisco. It was still uncertain whether national guard troops would participate.

Official Response

The operation is the result of an extended period of threats by the administration to target the liberal city. California’s governor Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, describing it as “taken directly from the authoritarian playbook”.

“He sends out unidentified officers, he dispatches Border Patrol, he deploys immigration officials, he creates worry and terror in the population so that he can take credit for addressing that by sending in the national guard,” Newsom said. “This is no different than the firestarter extinguishing the inferno.”

Local Planning

San Francisco is the newest major city focused on by Donald Trump’s campaign of large-scale detentions. The operation is expected to trigger a showdown between the White House and local leaders who have pledged to stop militarized immigration enforcement in the city.

San Franciscans have been readying for weeks for Trump to carry out repeated threats to dispatch personnel to the city. At a Wednesday media briefing, San Francisco’s municipal chief stated again that the city was ready.

“For months, we have been preparing for the likelihood of a potential national intervention in our city,” stated the official, explaining that he had taken further executive actions on Wednesday to “enhance the city’s assistance to our foreign-born residents, and guarantee our agencies are prepared ahead of any federal deployment.”

Constitutional Framework

Regardless of court battles to missions in a number of cities, including the Windy City, the Pacific Northwest and LA, Trump has asserted “complete control” to deploy the state troops in cities, pointing to the presidential authority which enables presidents certain rights to deploy troops on domestic land.

Community Response

Newsom, who previously served as San Francisco’s city leader – had pledged to take action “right away” to a operation in the city. “The idea that the White House can dispatch personnel into our cities with no legitimate cause grounded in reality, no supervision, no answerability, disregard for regional control – it’s a direct assault on the judicial framework,” he said on Wednesday.

Community groups, including social justice nonprofits established during the first Trump administration, have prepped to quickly mobilize a large protest in the city, as well as candlelight gatherings at local libraries.

Community Consequences

In San Francisco’s Mission district, a largely Hispanic population, city supervisor informed journalists last week she and her residents had been preparing for this moment. “The time that people stop going to work, when minority individuals cannot move about freely without the apprehension of national personnel racially profiling and detaining them, the moment when parents stop sending kids to school, are too scared to go to the grocery store or medical provider,” she said. “What we have been preparing for in the Mission is basically a closure the scale of which we haven’t seen since the health crisis.”

Military Status

Roughly 300 out of several thousand state national guard troops stay under federal control under an directive from Trump. About 200 of them had been sent to Oregon, where they were waiting in limbo in the midst of a court case over their deployment.

This week, Newsom said he had requested the state military personnel under his command to manage distribution centers amid the federal closure.