A middle schooler’s report of being confronted by an ICE agent on a Muni bus sparked a panic among parents and undocumented San Franciscans late last week. The report turned out to be false, but city officials, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement itself, were painfully slow to quell fears of a deportation crackdown. If it was a test case of San Francisco’s response to likely Trump-era immigration enforcement, then the city got a failing grade.
The communications response can be described as frantic at best.
San Francisco Unified School District administrators fired off an email to parents that immediately leaked on social media — but didn’t answer their phones when contacted by The Standard. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency sent a systemwide alert to its bus drivers, but as of late Thursday found no evidence on security cameras of immigration agents on its fleet.
Still, the agency’s and school district’s actions were enough to fuel wild speculation about an ICE raid on the city’s transit system, which activists quickly suspected was nonsense but still proliferated until midday Friday.
In the end, SFMTA, the school board, the San Francisco Police Department, the mayor’s office, and ICE took almost 24 hours to set the record straight.
The whole fiasco, which came at the end of President Donald Trump’s first week in office, portends many more disinformation-fueled scrambles.
Despite the efforts of nonprofits and assurances of city officials, undocumented San Franciscans will continue to have a hard time trusting that they’re safe from la migra — and this climate of perpetual fear may be exactly what the new administration wants. These anxieties will continue to spur and spread rumors, which will continue to set off cross-departmental city responses (and give journalists heart attacks).
“Out in the world, people are spinning out of control when there’s no information, there’s no clarity,” a former city official who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Standard. “[Local government] should jump on it, because otherwise it spins out, and social media takes over.”
Thanks to the equivocal response, the fire was still smoldering a full day after the student’s claims. Two more unconfirmed reports of ICE vehicles appeared Friday on Nextdoor. The Standard visited the sites of the alleged sightings and talked to people on the streets, none of whom had seen or heard anything about an ICE presence in the area. The people who made the Nextdoor posts did not respond to interview requests, and city officials had no information.
One measure that could have short-circuited the rumor mill is a clear information hierarchy. Communications experts say it’s best practice for the mayor’s office to either lead the media response or designate another department to do so in times of crisis.
Instead, the false report set off an explosive chain reaction, in which city agencies, schools, and media outlets felt they had to say something to address the rumors spreading on social media. These statements seemed to lend credence to the rumor, fueling further speculation.
And the result was that a bunch of people were really freaked out — more freaked out than they had to be. And that may be helping Trump’s cause far more than local officials intended.