Open-government experts and civic leaders are questioning why Mayor Daniel Lurie is withholding records of a phone call with President Trump that reportedly averted a federal immigration enforcement surge, saying the secrecy undermines public trust as worries spread about threats to city residents’ civil rights.
After the Oct. 22 call, the mayor’s office responded to a records request by providing only Lurie’s official itinerary entry: “7:30pm-7:55pm Phone Call with Donald Trump, President of the United States re: calling off potential federal deployment in San Francisco.” All other records were secret for reasons of attorney-client privilege, the office stated.
So the Public Press narrowed its request to routine factual records, such as a list of participants in the call. The mayor’s office responded by claiming none existed.
“After a reasonable and diligent search, we have determined that we have no responsive records,” read the emailed response. “We now consider your request closed.”
David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a San Rafael-based free speech and sunshine advocacy organization, said that while some material related to the call could legitimately be privileged, the breadth of the mayor’s claimed exemption from disclosure raised significant doubts.
Invoking attorney-client privilege suggests someone from the city attorney’s office might have been involved in the call, Snyder said, but that alone doesn’t justify withholding records, and a list of who participated in the call would likely contain no confidential legal communication.
“I really struggle to see how the mere presence of a lawyer in a conversation between the mayor of the city and the president of the United States would render that communication privileged,” he said.
Snyder added that the public has an “immense” interest in understanding such a high-level exchange about a potential federal law-enforcement surge. “Anytime you have that kind of unusual outcome, legitimate questions are raised, which I think public officials have a duty to address through transparency,” he said.
The president contemporaneously issued public statements saying he had conversed with several wealthy local businesspeople about the issue, leading to speculation about backchannel discussions with the mayor, and what might have been promised in return for the president backing off.
In a news conference to summarize the call, Lurie said Trump “asked me for nothing, and everything I told you is all I said to him.”
After an initial Public Press story, at least one local resident filed a complaint with the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, the 11-member panel charged with encouraging and monitoring City Hall’s compliance with local and state open-meetings and public-records laws.
A complaint alleges that the mayor’s office improperly withheld records. Courts usually instruct agencies to interpret exemptions narrowly when public safety, civil rights or political influence are at stake, as laid out in the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance and the California Public Records Act.
If the task force finds a violation, the case could be referred to the Ethics Commission, the Board of Supervisors, the district attorney or the state attorney general.
Snyder, once a member of the task force, said the Ethics Commission has the power to compel disclosure of records based on these referrals. But to his knowledge “that has rarely been done, or potentially never been done.”
According to Politico, Lurie “really did not want to revisit” the subject this week while speaking at an artificial intelligence summit in Hayes Valley — dubbed “Cerebral Valley” in tech circles — sponsored by Oracle, Nvidia and IREN.
When a moderator broached Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s initial calls for a National Guard deployment, the mayor twice deflected before saying, “People who aren’t living in San Francisco didn’t see what we were seeing … What I’ve told everybody, including Marc and any other leader, I said, ‘Walk with me.’”
Transparency lapse fuels suspicion
Jennifer Esteen, vice president of organizing for Service Employees International Union Local 1021, said at a Nov. 5 meeting of the city’s Commission Streamlining Task Force that the mayor’s lack of transparency demonstrates why the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force should remain, despite suggestions to end or merge it with another body.
“If elected officials want to flout the law, they will,” Esteen told the five-member streamlining panel. “You don’t need to help them. Do not make this body go away in three years.”
The panel voted unanimously on Nov. 5 to recommend that the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force be retained as a stand-alone, policy-level body, though it also moved to strip journalism and good governance groups of their exclusive nominating privileges.
In a follow-up interview, Esteen said that despite Lurie’s assurances he made no private agreement with Trump, the secrecy leaves room to wonder whether the mayor felt pressured to “sweep people off the streets and into jails” after a July Trump executive order to crack down on “crime and disorder on America’s streets.”
“Daniel Lurie must have been reminded of that during the phone call,” she said. “He must have told Donald Trump, ‘Don’t send your federal agents to do the work. I’ll use our local police force. Give me a chance. Let me prove it to you.’ We’ll never know.”
Esteen said that without public accounting of the call, colleagues in the county jail system, where she works part time as a nurse, could only speculate when they began processing a “conspicuously high number” of inmate arrivals.
“They increased sweeps to seven days a week,” she said. “The jail was overflowing in a way that I had not ever experienced. They surmise that this is because of a deal made between Lurie and Trump.”
The mayor’s vagueness coupled with his close relationships with tech billionaires leaves the public questioning to whom he is ultimately accountable, she said. According to The New York Times, to head off the threatened federal show of force, Lurie and his aides “power-mapped” Silicon Valley leaders, including Benioff and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who then placed calls to Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, urging them to call off the surge.
Esteen said the Board of Supervisors should reverse the expanded powers it granted Lurie at the start of his term in January to address the fentanyl crisis. The supervisors voted 10-1 to approve this authority, despite a legislative analyst’s warning that oversight in the plan was lacking.
“He thinks that he’s bringing Silicon Valley’s best and brightest into City Hall,” she said. “Instead what he’s doing is giving them access to the halls of power that the people should have access to.”
Doubting federal ‘partnership’ talk
At a City Hall press conference the day after the call, Lurie said he told Trump that militarized presence was unnecessary because San Francisco was “delivering results” on crime by reducing car break-ins, homicides and homeless encampment activity.
He also said he told Trump that he would “welcome continued partnerships” with other federal agencies, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Lurie said during the press conference that he also spoke with U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi that morning about local police partnering to combat drug trafficking.
Trump wrote on Truth Social the morning after his call that Lurie “asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around.”
“I told him, ‘It’s an easier process if we do it, faster, stronger, and safer but, let’s see how you do?’” Trump wrote.
Trump said he was influenced by some of the same people Lurie had reached out to: “Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot,’” he wrote. “Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”
The cancellation of federal immigration enforcement earned Lurie praise from Democrats, especially fervent Trump critics representing San Francisco, such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and state Sen. Scott Wiener.
In an interview last week, Wiener said he was grateful Lurie helped avert a National Guard deployment, but cautioned that any federal collaboration must be limited. Wiener noted that Trump and Bondi have reassigned multiple agencies to immigration enforcement. “We do have to be very careful in terms of making sure that we are not seeing more mass deportation presence in San Francisco,” he said.