An undercover San Francisco cop bought a $40 bag of meth from a suspected drug dealer Oct. 14 near Market and 12th streets. As the incognito cop left with his purchase, a group of officers, including federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents, moved in to make the arrest, according to an affidavit. It was just one of three similar operations that day across the city.
Collaboration between local and federal law enforcement plays out in many ways despite the open conflict — in rhetoric, at least — between local Democrats and Republicans in Washington.
Now, these connections are under heightened scrutiny as President Donald Trump weighs sending federal troops or immigration agents into San Francisco and other cities.
Despite opposing Trump’s repeated threats to send in the National Guard and crack down on immigrants, Mayor Daniel Lurie said last week he’d welcome working with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and federal law enforcement to go after drug dealers.
In fact, there’s already a complex web of agreements that govern how the San Francisco Police Department and other local agencies can work with federal law enforcement. The SFPD has had agreements with the FBI as part of an anti-gang unit, DEA as part of a drug task force, the U.S. Marshals Service as part of a violent offender unit, and the United States Park Police.
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The Standard spoke with two former SFPD officers, two former command staffers and a former federal prosecutor to gain a clearer understanding of how collaborations work.
How often are local and federal law enforcement agencies in contact?
Even when they’re not side-by-side on the streets, federal agents and city cops are sharing information every day.
‘They are looking for any reason to criminalize immigrants, and lumping them in with drug dealers is only helping them with that task of having a mass deportation machine.’
Supervisor Jackie Fielder
The FBI has access to California’s clearinghouse for criminal information, known as CLETS, which includes arrest records and bulletins about wanted suspects. Local officers, meanwhile, tap into the FBI’s national fingerprint database to check if suspects and defendants are linked to crimes out of the state.
Higher-level coordination between ranking officers and federal officials takes place through the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, which shares intelligence with local, state, and federal law enforcement, particularly for counter-terrorism purposes.
Don’t sanctuary laws prevent cooperation with the feds?
San Francisco is a proponent of sanctuary laws that prohibit its police officers from aiding federal authorities with immigration enforcement. The idea is that there should be a clear line between local cops and feds, so people will report crimes without fear of being turned over to immigration authorities. But that dividing line does not apply to other types of law enforcement, such as an undercover operation to bust drug dealers.
There are recent examples of the SFPD overstepping these bounds. This year, it was discovered that the department’s license plate reading cameras, operated by Flock, allowed out-of-state law enforcement agencies to search San Francisco’s data on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
What is an example of these partnerships?
The High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program (opens in new tab), launched in 1988, uses a combination of federal and local funds for a task force run by the DEA that operates in San Francisco. The officer who took part in the Oct. 14 drug bust in the Tenderloin has been on the task force since April 2022. The task force director did not respond to a request for comment.
Housed in the DEA’s offices in the federal building on Golden Gate Street, the unit includes officers from San Francisco, South San Francisco, and Daly City, as well as the California Highway Patrol, DEA, and the U.S. Marshals Service. It mostly picks up cases with the potential for major busts that could meet the threshold (amounts of drugs seized or links to larger networks) to be taken to federal court, according to a law enforcement officer with knowledge of the unit.
Local agencies typically funnel cases to the task force because it has the resources and time to obtain wire taps, conduct surveillance, cultivate informants, and buy drugs from suspected dealers.
These partnerships come and go. In 2017, the SFPD stepped away from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (opens in new tab) over fears that the Trump administration would spy on citizens and violate their rights, which had been an issue at the SFPD years before (opens in new tab).
The SFPD did not respond to a request for comment about the status of its agreements with federal offices.
Who needs to approve collaboration?
When SFPD officers are sent to a federal task force, their duties are spelled out in memorandums of understanding between the departments. Those agreements explicitly ban local officers from taking part in immigration enforcement.
Federal law enforcement officers work with locals in a variety of ways that are case-dependent, according to former federal prosecutor William Frentzen, who noted that the collaboration can be on a single case or as part of a long-term task force.
Such partnerships and sharing of information can be clandestine. Locals assigned to a taskforce or a unit can be prohibited from sharing investigative details with colleagues in their department.
“Overall, we share with them to a certain extent, but not without permission, and that’s usually through the chief of police,” said a former member of the SFPD command staff.
Are local prosecutors recruited to work on federal cases?
There was one prominent recent case of the San Francisco district attorney working side by side with federal counterparts that was criticized for appearing to skirt the limit of what is allowed under city sanctuary laws.
Former prosecutor John Ullom was deputized by the U.S. attorney’s office to prosecute federal cases from Oct. 4, 2023, until he left the DA’s office earlier this year. He focused almost entirely on drug cases, but many defendants also had immigration issues.
The San Francisco public defender has alleged that Ullom violated city sanctuary rules by working closely with immigration officials in Superior Court cases he handled. In one instance, he was seen talking to an ICE agent outside of court in 2023 before a criminal defendant was detained by the agency for allegedly violating immigration laws. The criminal cases were subsequently dropped.
The DA said Ullom’s cooperation with federal authorities did not violate sanctuary laws but created an easier path to convict and punish drug dealers through the federal court process.
How firm is the firewall against aiding immigration enforcement?
All current and former officers who spoke to The Standard said federal law enforcement officers who work with San Francisco are careful not to cross clear lines drawn by the city.
“The agents we work with know our policies,” said one former SFPD officer who worked closely with federal authorities.
But the Trump administration’s priorities are complicating those boundaries. Federal officers, including those at the FBI, DEA, and Bureau of A (opens in new tab)lcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, have increasingly been reassigned to aid ICE.
One former SFPD command staffer who now works in another local agency said Homeland Security Investigations agents told him their work on immigration enforcement has pulled them away from criminal investigations. That has “blurred” an already gray line between cooperating on criminal cases and aiding in immigration enforcement, he said.
Another former SFPD officer said federal agents who are co-opted for immigration enforcement are often sent to operations out of the Bay Area to avoid soiling long-standing relationships.
“They will send them up to Humboldt to go do some stuff for a week, and then they come back,” he said.
Still, there’s a history of these rules being broken.
In 2015, a handful of officers detained a man and handed him over to immigration authorities (opens in new tab), in violation of city sanctuary laws.
In 2016, an SFPD liaison officer working with the FBI allegedly violated city rules (opens in new tab) by questioning a Google employee alongside an FBI agent. The interaction violated a rule barring police from spying on citizens. The following year, the SFPD left the task force that handled the case.
In 2019, Homeland Security investigators wrote in an affidavit that the agency arrested an MS-13 gang member in East Palo Alto on immigration violations after working closely on the case with an SFPD gang task force.
What do critics think?
Lurie’s tentative invitation to Bondi has raised alarm bells for some local elected leaders. Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who represents the Mission, a historically Latino district, said she takes issue with the mayor speaking favorably about working with agencies under Bondi’s purview, fearing such collaboration could fuel the ongoing immigration crackdown.
“They are looking for any reason to criminalize immigrants,” Fielder said, “and lumping them in with drug dealers is only helping them with that task of having a mass deportation machine.”