Lee and other Alameda County elected officials tore into the president and signaled they’re bracing for a fight.
by Eli Wolfe Aug. 14, 2025 (Oaklandside.com)
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President Donald Trump’s casual reference to Oakland during a press conference about crime on Monday has sparked a furious response from the city’s elected officials, who accused him today of distorting the truth, fomenting authoritarianism, fearmongering, and trying to distract the public from his ties to the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
At a City Hall press conference on Thursday, Mayor Barbara Lee promised residents that her administration will not back down against any threats from Trump.
“No one knows this president’s playbook better than I do,” Lee said, noting that she served in Congress during his first administration, and was on the House floor on January 6, 2021, when Trump encouraged his supporters while they stormed the Capitol in an attempted insurrection.
Trump’s recent comment about Oakland was made during a press conference announcing his takeover of the Washington D.C. police. Through the D.C. takeover and Trump’s earlier deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, Trump has signaled a willingness to clash with the Democratic Party leaders of major cities, which he has characterized as lawless, despite historically low and falling crime rates in most metro areas.
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Lee said Oakland’s legal team is analyzing the constitutionality of some of Trump’s statements, including his threat to send National Guard troops to different cities across the country, and coordinating how to respond with state and local allies.
“When Donald Trump threatens our communities, we stand up, and I stood up to him before, over and over and over again. And as mayor, I will continue to stand firm with you,” Lee said.
Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas said that Trump is wrong about Oakland, and that local leaders are “laser focused” on public safety improvements. She touted the county’s recent work approving plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars from Measure C on early childcare and education, and a “historic $1.4 billion investment of Measure W funds for homelessness solutions across the county.”
“Let’s be clear today that Trump’s threats and his deployment of the National Guard are not about safety or law, this is about fear and control, and it is a blatant abuse of power,” Bas said.
Several councilmembers also condemned Trump’s remarks. Rowena Brown, Oakland’s at-large councilmember, argued Trump’s comments are part of a “long, harmful pattern where leaders distort the truth about majority Black communities to justify federal overreach, aggressive policing, and the erosion of our civil liberties.”
Councilmember Janani Ramachandran said Trump is using Oakland as a scapegoat to distract the public from his connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
Calling Trump “Mister Convicted Felon,” Councilmember Carroll Fife scoffed at the idea that Trump cares about law and order, referring to Trump’s criminal convictions. Fife also accused the president of “grooming communities “to prepare us for an abusive relationship that he wants to have with the American people.”
Brenda Harbin-Forte, a former Alameda County Superior Court judge who helped lead the recall against former Mayor Sheng Thao, spoke at the press conference, sharing a statement from NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson, who said that Trump campaigned on law and order but is a “president of chaos and corruption.”
Oakland leaders promised to support immigrants, but advocates say they need more help from the city
The press conference at City Hall occurred just two days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained at least six people in East Oakland. The detainees include a 17-year-old and a person with Down Syndrome, according to Nikolas De Bremaeker, an immigrants’ rights managing attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza.
At the press conference on Thursday, De Bremaeker shared that the detained residents had been held in “deplorable conditions” at ICE’s San Francisco field office and that the situation has been especially traumatizing for the child.
“When I had to explain that his family members had been transferred, he just broke down in tears,” De Bremaeker said. He said the cell that held the child had a “piece of plastic to use as a blanket,” a bare cement floor, and one toilet without any privacy partition.
According to De Bremaeker, the child has been transferred to a facility in New York, and several of the other detained residents, including the person with Down Syndrome, have been sent to a facility in Tacoma, Washington.
During her speech, Lee affirmed that Oakland is a sanctuary city, providing support to immigrant communities and families affected by ICE.
De Braemaker said what Centro Legal needs is support from the city to help fund the work being done by attorneys, who file habeas petitions and temporary restraining orders to try to free detained immigrations, plus the social workers and other response staff who handle these matters.
“We are calling on the city of Oakland to work with us to build resources to be able to file more of these [motions],” De Braemaker told reporters. “The Trump administration is not playing by the rules; they’re breaking the law, and the only way to address this is by bringing these petitions to federal court.”
Lourdes Martinez, directing attorney of Centro Legal’s immigrants’ rights practice, said that Oakland did help fund some rapid response immigration services during the first Trump administration. Alameda County recently allocated money to the Alameda County Immigration Legal Education Partnership, which runs a hotline used to report ICE interactions and detentions. But Oakland so far hasn’t thrown in support. Martinez said she hopes the city will come to the table and work with the organizations and agencies that are collaborating on this front.
“Our assessment of the city of Oakland is we’re not prepared for what may come in terms of ICE enforcement now that ICE is the best-funded law enforcement agency of the federal government,” Martinez said. “It really could increase what we see at the local level.”
ELI WOLFE
Eli Wolfe reports on City Hall for The Oaklandside. He was previously a senior reporter for San José Spotlight, where he had a beat covering Santa Clara County’s government and transportation. He also worked as an investigative reporter for the Pasadena-based newsroom FairWarning, where he covered labor, consumer protection and transportation issues. He started his journalism career as a freelancer based out of Berkeley. Eli’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, NBCNews.com, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Eli graduated from UC Santa Cruz and grew up in San Francisco.More by Eli Wolfe
