We know that San Fran is tolerant. How tolerant? While they say they want to stop the sale/use of fentanyl, their actions say the opposite.
“When asked if they would cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport these gang-affiliated dealers, almost all of the city’s supervisors fell silent. Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder, Danny Sauter, Shamann Walton, Myrna Melgar, Bilal Mahmood, and Chyanne Chen refused to respond to two requests for comment. Supervisor Stephen Sherrill provided a vague answer on X, saying fentanyl dealers “have no place” in San Francisco, without clarification. His statement was met with taunts on the social media platform, branding him “another coward” and asking, “Yes or no? Simple question to answer in one word.”
Supervisor Joel Engardio wrote that he supports the federal government’s authority to deport felons found guilty of violating the law but would not urge cooperation with ICE, “because it cannot be trusted to apply the rule of law fairly.”
They are liars. Their silence shows support for cartels and drug dealers. San Fran is totally open for drugs and foreign criminals.
Why Doesn’t San Francisco Want to Deport Drug Dealers?
Public safety and order take a back seat to sanctuary city priorities.
Erica Sandberg, City Journal, 2/19/25 https://www.city-journal.org/article/san-francisco-drug-dealers-illegal-immigrants-deport
Get out.
You don’t expect to hear that message in a city known for its “come one, come all” attitude, but San Francisco’s fentanyl crisis is so severe that residents are feeling none too hospitable. The targets of their ire: drug dealers, most of them illegal immigrants from Honduras, who supply toxic substances to the thousands of addicts flooding the city, ushering in danger and chaos.
San Francisco’s new mayor Daniel Lurie has made the drug scene and homelessness problem a focal point for his administration. Soon after taking office last month, he brought his plan to mitigate the city’s open-air drug-consumption problem to the Board of Supervisors. All but one of the 11-member board—a legislative entity that collectively holds at least as much power as the mayor—voted to approve his Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance, which will initiate creation of a new stabilization center for homeless people with drug-abuse disorders, adding 1,500 shelter beds and hiring more public-safety and behavioral-health specialists. Rather than leaving sick people on the street or dropping them off at the hospital, police officers, paramedics, and street-crisis response teams will take them to the center, thus freeing up hospital emergency departments and first-responder resources. At the centers, addicts ideally will begin a journey toward sobriety and health.
But will the city also take stricter action against the drug dealers? In 2024, the San Francisco Chronicle exposed the pipeline of cartel-run fentanyl traffickers who send money back to their home country as they lay waste to communities.
When asked if they would cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport these gang-affiliated dealers, almost all of the city’s supervisors fell silent. Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder, Danny Sauter, Shamann Walton, Myrna Melgar, Bilal Mahmood, and Chyanne Chen refused to respond to two requests for comment. Supervisor Stephen Sherrill provided a vague answer on X, saying fentanyl dealers “have no place” in San Francisco, without clarification. His statement was met with taunts on the social media platform, branding him “another coward” and asking, “Yes or no? Simple question to answer in one word.”
Supervisor Joel Engardio wrote that he supports the federal government’s authority to deport felons found guilty of violating the law but would not urge cooperation with ICE, “because it cannot be trusted to apply the rule of law fairly.”
The only affirmative responses came from board president Rafael Mandelman and Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
Mandelman, a sanctuary advocate, draws the line at some crimes. “If you’re convicted and in jail, I don’t have any interest in protecting you if you’re a rapist or a murderer. Drug dealers can be deadly. It would be better to get police and criminal justice response to enforce laws but if that’s not going to happen, I endorse deportation.”
Dorsey, who is in addiction recovery, was refreshingly unequivocal: yes, fentanyl dealers who sell in San Francisco and are in the U.S. unlawfully should face deportation. He has proposed adding fentanyl-dealing felonies to sanctuary city exceptions.
The mute or weak responses show that most of San Francisco’s supervisors are unwilling to serve the communities they ostensibly represent. Their silence on the issue of deporting immigrant drug dealers contrasts with their outspoken behavior at a rally for the city’s sanctuary policies earlier this year, when they stood on the steps of City Hall, declaring that they would not cooperate with the federal government. San Francisco has been a sanctuary city since 1989, when it passed an ordinance (since strengthened by follow-up ordinances) preventing city officials from supporting federal immigration efforts and police from asking about immigration status.
The ordinance, however, was meant to protect individuals and families who arrived to seek a better life, not to give safe haven to people who cross the border to commit serious crimes. As the Chronicle has reported, dealers find the city a magnet precisely because they are less likely to be deported there.
Why not just arrest and prosecute drug dealers, no matter where they’re from? Brooke Jenkins, the city’s district attorney, noted that most San Francisco judges refuse to treat drug dealing as a serious crime. Most offenders have little fear of incarceration or any significant consequence for their crimes; even if they go to jail, they tend to get released quickly.
Consequently, hundreds of dealers continue to show up on the streets and alleyways of San Francisco. Most commute from the East Bay to peddle fentanyl, methamphetamine, and other drugs in the Tenderloin, Civic Center, South of Market, and the Mission. They work in shifts, 24/7. Many addicts purchase and then imbibe the drugs on the spot, huddling in small groups. Others take it back to their homes—mostly seedy hotels—to use alone.
The areas with the highest concentration of dealers resemble the front line of a war, with people stumbling, folding over, or falling unconscious. Medics rush in to administer naloxone to reverse overdoses. Per San Francisco’s Overdose Prevention Plan, the city increased its naloxone distribution to more than 158,000 doses in fiscal year 2023 to 2024—a staggering average of 432 every day.
The triage efforts are temporary. On a daily basis, lifeless bodies get carted out in plastic sheeting, on their way to the morgue. Last year in San Francisco, 633 people died of overdose. From 2020 to 2024, almost 3,400 lives were lost. Nearly all the deaths were a result of the illicit fentanyl manufactured overseas and transported into the U.S.
The wreckage extends to neighbors and merchants forced to contend with violence, filth, and squalor. Low-income people, the disabled, immigrants, seniors, and families with children make up most of the residents of these areas.
Lurie’s fentanyl ordinance is an encouraging step, but only stemming the flow of cheap and readily available drugs will allow San Francisco and her people to recover. On this, there should be consensus. If that means working with the federal government and ICE agents to get it done, then do it.
The Trump administration is forcing change on San Francisco, and the city’s leaders find themselves backed into a corner. Border czar Tom Homan sent a message to all sanctuary cities: like it or not, ICE will crack down on transnational criminal gangs. The administration announced that it would take all legally available action to withdraw federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions. Such a measure could hobble San Francisco, already financially strapped.
The city’s leaders could make a case for providing sanctuary to people who have entered the country illegally but not otherwise committed crimes, but they would need to make a clear public distinction between these individuals and more serious lawbreakers. It shouldn’t require much courage to say that people who unlawfully enter the United States and then proceed to sell deadly substances do not deserve protection.
