For the Second Harvest of Silicon Valley food bank in Santa Clara County, the California National Guard were “lifesavers” during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, said CEO Leslie Bacho.

Some 200 Guard troops filled in for the nonprofit’s hundreds of volunteers who were under stay-at-home orders. They packed, loaded and distributed meals to people who suddenly found themselves out of work or in desperate need of help to feed themselves and their families.

Nearly six years later, Bacho might be inclined to say “thanks so much but we’ll see” to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s offer to send the state’s National Guard troops to food banks again, this time to help them cope with a possible influx of hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents facing delays in their federal food assistance payments, due the federal government shutdown.

Unfortunately, the timing of Newsom’s “humanitarian deployment” of National Guard members presents complications for food banks, as Bacho explained. In the past four months, the Trump administration has ordered the National Guard to play an increasing role in its widening crackdowns on immigration and violent crime in cities around the United States. This timing, therefore, raises concerns that the presence of federal uniformed troops at food-distribution sites could be scary for certain low-income populations.

“Just in this moment there’s a lot of fear and concern in the community,” Bacho said. “We would be having folks who are associated with law enforcement at sites who might scare people away,” she said with evident regret, given her regard for National Guard efforts in March 2020.

Bacho said she could see National Guard troops helping out in their warehouses, though the food bank currently has enough volunteers at those locations.

Similarly, Caitlyn Sly, CEO of the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, said they don’t have a need for National Guard help right now and tend to have plenty of volunteers during the holiday season. But the situation could change in the coming weeks if the shutdown continues, Slay said. There are some 98,000 households in their two-county service area that won’t be getting payments from CalFresh, California’s version of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “We’re grateful for the offer,” she said. “If we end up needing it, we will call upon it.”

But, like Bacho, Sly said her food bank would be wary about having federal troops in any public-facing role at this present time and would instead have them work at their two warehouses in Concord and Fairfield.

“There is so much chaos and confusion going on for low-income individuals and people experiencing hunger, especially among our immigrant populations,” Sly said. Their clients also could confuse National Guard members with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, she said. “We wouldn’t want to unnecessarily scare or deter people from feeling safe to come get food from us.”

Thus far, both the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and the Alameda County Food Bank have declined offers of California National Guard help, according to NBC BayArea. It’s not not clear if these food banks have enough staff and volunteers to distribute food, or if they had concerns about the presence of uniformed troops at their work sites. Executives at these food banks were not available to comment over the weekend.

As the federal government shutdown drags into its fourth week, Newsom’s office announced that it was deploying National Guard troops to food banks and fast-tracking up to $80 million in state funding for these organizations. Some 5.5 million CalFresh recipients have begun to experience delays in their November food benefits, his office said.

“As SNAP delays hit dinner tables right before the holiday season, the state is working hard to keep families from going hungry,” Newsom said in a statement Friday.

The first deployment of California National Guard troops began Friday at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, where they helped civilian volunteers sort and package 25,000 pounds of fresh produce. As a local TV news station reported, these troops helped “give back to the community,” just months after some 4,000 of their colleagues were dispatched to Los Angeles to hold back crowds protesting immigration raids.

“Today, the California Military Department is on the ground supporting food bank operations in Los Angeles,” Major General Matthew P. Beevers, the department’s Adjutant General said in a statement. “We are grateful to play a crucial role in this effort and honored to serve our communities once again.”

But as if anticipating the concerns of food bank executives like Bacho and Sly, Newsom’s office said that Guard members would work behind the scenes at warehouses, where they could be put to work packing boxes, managing deliveries and otherwise moving supplies to keep food flowing to people in need. Under the governor’s command and at the direction of the state’s Department of Social Services, troops won’t interact directly with the public and they will “not conduct any immigration questions or enforcement.”

Even with the troops having orders to not conduct enforcement operations, Bacho expects that some of their clients will still want to avoid going anywhere near them. And as Second Harvest remains open to welcoming National Guard help in the future, “we want to reassure folks that we won’t have a National Guard presence at our distribution sites because we don’t want people to be afraid to reach out for help.”