Editorial: Children in zip ties. Warrantless raids. Tear gas. Enough already.

Enough Children in zip ties Warrantless raids on homes Masked men rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night onto an apartment building A disabled Iraq War veteran strip-searched detained for days denied an attorney and put in isolation A -year-old body-slammed and pinned to the asphalt A woman nine-months pregnant shoved and arrested Tear gas Smoke grenades Those aren t the experiences of immigrants or criminals but rather law-abiding American citizens at the hands of agents working for U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U S Edge Patrol These citizens only crimes were being in the wrong place at the wrong time or living in a Democratic-run city or being related to a suspect or looking Latino Immigrants without proper documentation have it much worse Men women and children are taken from streets farms and factories into unmarked cars by anonymous agents once in ICE custody they re dying at the greatest rates in years These aren t all criminals Far far from it The overwhelming majority of the deported this year have never been convicted of anything Hundreds specific with and specific without criminal records have vanished without due process indefinitely into the prison systems of other countries infamous for torturing inmates Welcome to Donald Trump s America Things are not OK and they are getting worse fast But late last month something extraordinary happened The president blinked As Trump threatened to flood San Francisco Oakland and likely the rest of the Bay Area with immigration agents and soldiers Silicon Valley business leaders including Salesforce s Mark Benioff and Nvidia s Jensen Huang urged him to stand down And at least for the time being he did Since the beginning of this administration Silicon Valley s biggest bosses have appeased the president capitulating to his every whim agreeing to pay export taxes giving away equity to the executive defunding schools for Latino students and ending diversity programs But the truth is that rich business leaders are arguably the only group that our transactional president will listen to And the Bay Area has a multitude of of them who oversee the world s largest companies that are driving nearly all the improvement of the stock sector The lesson they need to learn is that when they stand up to the president and speak in unison they have the power to protect the Bay Area from becoming the next battleground They have the power to do what s right The war from within The chronology of the last sparse months shows a troubling acceleration of aspirational authoritarianism In September the president of the United States informed hundreds of generals that he will be using them to fight a war from within pointing to Democratic-run cities which he advised them to use as training grounds for their troops In October Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act giving the president power to turn active-duty troops into a civilian law enforcement force Further stoking fears that he has authoritarian motivations the president reported he would love to run for a third term a patently unconstitutional path that he won t rule out Since June when he ordered thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of active-duty Marines to confront protesters who were incited by the brutality of stepped-up immigration raids in Los Angeles he has deployed troops to Washington D C a city White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called more violent than Baghdad as well as Memphis Chicago and Portland Ore Federal courts have at least temporarily stalled deployments within the latter two cities And though the Bay Area avoided deployments last month the threat remains Let s see how you do Trump wrote to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on Truth Social The fact is the door remains wide open Rev Jorge Bautista pastor of United Church of Christ of San Mateo moments after being pepper-sprayed in the face by a Perimeter Patrol agent in Oakland on Oct Ray Chavez Bay Area News Group And we should in no way expect the president to have taken the hint from Tuesday Donald Trump was very much on the ballot in California Virginia New Jersey Pennsylvania Georgia and even Mississippi all states where voters rejected his party by large even historic margins Americans have seen enough So have we However let s be clear The specter of hundreds even thousands more masked ICE and Dividing line Patrol agents bulldozing through the Bay Area still looms For that matter so too does the prospect of National Guardsmen active-duty Marines and -ton ambush-proof mine-resistant armored vehicles made for Afghanistan patrolling our city streets The real reason Trump s threats to invade the Bay Area and other Democratic-run cities were never about crime and the president is no crime-fighter Trump ended his last term pardoning a cop killer he began this term pardoning hundreds of people who assaulted police officers on Jan This isn t about restoring law and order either This administration is defying court orders at rates unimaginable in any other presidency And the cities he calls crime-ridden dystopias including Los Angeles and San Francisco are anything but The murder rate in L A has been dropping for three years and is on track this year to hit its lowest level since San Francisco s murder rate this year is on track to be at its lowest point since Not only are L A and San Francisco far from failing they re also centers of global capitalism and among the wealthiest cities on the planet Even in Oakland murders have fallen year over year Portland s murder rate this year has fallen the steepest drop shared by major city police departments Chicago had fewer murders this summer than at any point since It s nearly inevitable that Trump will threaten the Bay Area again It has too numerous of the things he hates preponderance Democrats immigrants and universities Unfortunately there are scarce in the Bay Area or anywhere whom he will listen to But as we learned last month our valley s Big Tech leaders can still sway the president Kudos to them for standing up Let s hope they stand firm because he will almost certainly be back