Shots fired, driver hurt and held after truck rams into Coast Guard base in California

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A truck driver who backed into a U.S. Coast Guard base in the San Francisco Bay Area — the site of earlier protests against federal immigration agents — was shot by law enforcement officers and wounded, authorities said Friday.

The driver was held for a mental health evaluation after “attempting to weaponize the vehicle to ram into Coast Guard Base Alameda ” on Thursday night, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted on X. The FBI later said the driver was in custody.

A bystander was struck by a “fragment,” treated at a hospital and released, the Department of Homeland Security statement said. It did not elaborate.

No Coast Guard personnel were hurt, it said. Officers issued “multiple verbal commands” to stop, but the driver failed to comply, “suddenly accelerating backwards at a high rate of speed directly toward them,” the statement said.

“When the vehicle’s actions posed a direct threat to the safety of Coast Guard and security personnel, law enforcement officers discharged several rounds of defensive live fire," it said.

The driver was wounded in the stomach and was expected to survive, the statement said.

The FBI was investigating. It sent evidence, crisis management and bomb technician teams to the scene.

“At this time, the incident appears to be isolated, and there is no known current threat to the public,” FBI spokesperson Cameron Polan in San Francisco said in a statement.

No other details were immediately released.

Video from the scene showed what appeared to be a U-Haul truck trying to back into the base.

“U-Haul is assisting law enforcement to meet any investigative needs they have,” company spokesperson Jeff Lockridge said in a statement.

Coast Guard Island is a 67-acre (27-hectare) human-made island formed in 1913 in the Oakland Estuary between Oakland and Alameda. It is federally owned, does not allow visits from the general public without an escort or specific government identification, and it has been home to the current base, Base Alameda, since 2012, according to a Coast Guard document from 2016.

Base Alameda provides a variety of services for Coast Guard activities throughout the West Coast.

Earlier Thursday, protesters had assembled at the island, with many singing hymns and carrying signs saying, “Protect our neighbors” and “No ICE or troops in the Bay,” a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the National Guard.

Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had called off a planned surge of federal agents into San Francisco to quell crime. Mayor Daniel Lurie and Gov. Gavin Newsom said it was unnecessary because crime is on the decline.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents began arriving at the Coast Guard base in the region earlier Thursday for a possible ramp up of immigration enforcement, a move that drew several hundred protesters.

Trump said he backed off after speaking to the mayor and several prominent business leaders who said they’re working hard to clean up the city.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Friday during a news conference in Minneapolis that she had discussed the incident with Trump and suggested the president could change his mind about holding off a federal enforcement surge in the Bay Area if more violence occurs.

If they “don’t figure out how to protect our law enforcement officers and protect our Coast Guard members, that we would be forced to come in and protect those individuals,” she said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez that the operation had been called off for the entire Bay Area, a nine-county region of about 8 million people, Sgt. Roberto Morales, a spokesman for the sheriff, said Friday.

That decision was in contrast to others made by Trump to send the military into Democratic-run cities over fierce resistance from mayors and governors.

The deployment of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington faced challenges in two courts on Friday — one in the nation’s capital and another in West Virginia — while across the country a judge in Portland, Oregon, was considering whether to let Trump deploy troops there. Deployment remains blocked in the Chicago area.

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Associated Press writers Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed.