San Fran is a dead city. Worse, those left behind are being killed by drugs—permitted by the city government and brought into this nation by the Friends of Joe Biden, the Chinese Communist Party.
“Can federal officials still deport undocumented fentanyl dealers — or any undocumented person — out of San Francisco jails, sanctuary ordinance or no sanctuary ordinance? Of course they can. They would just have to do “what every other law-enforcement agency does: Get a warrant,” former Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Eileen Hirst told us in 2017. A San Francisco inmate being flagged because of outstanding bench warrants, DA warrants, traffic warrants, or out-of-county warrants, she continued, was “easily a daily occurrence.”
Hirst told us six years ago that the feds had never gone to the trouble of presenting San Francisco with a warrant, as other agencies do on the daily.”
The Progressive Klan/Democrats always have an excuse for not doing their job. Go to the Tenderloin area of the city and it is an open drug market, with cops watching the sales and OD’s. San Fran is for the dying.
SF plan to deport more fentanyl dealers is only *mostly* dead
by JOE ESKENAZI, Mission Local, 3/6/23
A potentially lethal 2mg dose of fentanyl
Back in the pleistocene — in 1989 — President George H.W. Bush pushed for a Constitutional amendment banning the burning of the American flag and punishing miscreants who dared do so.
This was a clear First Amendment loser. But, politically, less so: It offered Bush et al. the opportunity to denigrate opponents as actually supporting flag-burning.
Also in 1989, San Francisco passed its first Sanctuary City ordinance, which largely forbade local law-enforcement from materially aiding federal immigration authorities.
The timing of the two developments is coincidental but the comparison is not. One can abhor the notion of flag-burning and still oppose the cheap populism and gross Constitutional overreach of a flag-burning ban. And one needn’t support undocumented murderers, dope-dealers and rapists to support keeping local law-enforcement out of the immigration business so as to foster trust between police and immigrant communities — which makes everyone safer. One can even support the deportation of undocumented law-breakers, but also support that job being handled by the federal agency tasked with doing just that and funded to the tune of $82 billion a year.
The notion that sanctuary city ordinances coddle and enable undocumented criminals is a longstanding right-wing talking point; it was the 15-minute cities are a dystopian plot, something, something SOROS!!!! of yesteryear. But it also reveals a fundamental ignorance of what these ordinances actually do. Sanctuary city ordinances, in this and more than 400 other U.S. cities, do not prevent police from arresting undocumented people. They do not prevent District Attorneys from charging those people or juries from finding them guilty. They do not prevent undocumented residents from being sentenced to long prison terms. Or, in other states, being put to death.
Rather, they limit local law-enforcement from proactively working with immigration officials and sending out booking lists and opening up our hospitals and jails to the feds as was de rigueur in the past. Immigration agents, it turns out, have a troubling penchant for overstepping the terms of agreements with local agencies and sweeping up additional subjects; this happens often enough there’s even a term for it: Collateral arrests.
Ironically enough, Immigration has boundary issues.
Can federal officials still deport undocumented fentanyl dealers — or any undocumented person — out of San Francisco jails, sanctuary ordinance or no sanctuary ordinance? Of course they can. They would just have to do “what every other law-enforcement agency does: Get a warrant,” former Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Eileen Hirst told us in 2017. A San Francisco inmate being flagged because of outstanding bench warrants, DA warrants, traffic warrants, or out-of-county warrants, she continued, was “easily a daily occurrence.”
Hirst told us six years ago that the feds had never gone to the trouble of presenting San Francisco with a warrant, as other agencies do on the daily. Hirst’s successor, Tara Moriarty, tells us that’s still the case.
So that was the background and the context when Supervisor Matt Dorsey last week talked up colleagues on his proposal to add fentanyl-dealing to the list of carve-outs in the city’s sanctuary policy in which local officials are entitled to call in the feds. It did not go over well; Don Quixote had an easier time with the windmills than Dorsey did with the Board of Supervisors.
Dorsey tells me he doesn’t think he can move the ordinance out of his committee. He certainly doesn’t have six votes to pass it as legislation, and it seems he doesn’t even have the four votes needed to put it on the ballot. It’s not certain he has any votes other than his own (Dorsey’s ordinance, notably, has no co-sponsor).
Legislatively, this thing looks to be as dead as Julius Caesar.
But it’s still only mostly dead. If Dorsey — or anyone — wanted to gather signatures and put this issue on the ballot, he could do that. Our next scheduled election is March 2024, the deadline to turn in signatures is Nov. 6 of this year, and the required haul is 2 percent of registered voters — just over 10,000 signers.
This is a barrier more closely approximating Hawk Hill than Mount Kilimanjaro.
It remains to be seen whether Dorsey chooses to go this route, but, legislatively, he appears to have navigated into a cul-de-sac. While the move to enhance city cooperation with the feds and throttle up deportations of fentanyl dealers was emphatically ballyhooed in website comments sections and on social media, there remains a notable gap between those realms and San Francisco’s Board chambers.
We may yet learn how closely this angry online mood approximates the will of the general public and the city’s flesh-and-blood registered voters.
Dorsey tells me he’s not trying to make political hay — he just wants to end the fentanyl scourge. “I think this is something that will help save lives,” he says of his proposal. If he didn’t try to address the burgeoning overdose crisis, “I couldn’t sleep at night.”
The freshman supervisor’s elected colleagues tell me they think he’s sincere. But they also don’t think much of his proposal. And that became resplendently clear in open session last week.
Ahsha Safaí did not mince words, stating that Dorsey’s ordinance is “one of the most misguided pieces of legislation I have seen in six-and-a-half years” as supervisor and that “there is no way shape or form it will have any impact at all. … People selling the drugs and destroying communities should be held accountable and I 100 percent believe that, but making this into a immigration debate is a complete distraction and not the way we want to turn this issue around.”
But even if Dorsey is indeed sincere in his motivations, if you were going to put together a political sticky bomb — and portray elected officials as siding with deporting fentanyl dealers or coddling undocumented felons — it’d look a lot like this.
Six years ago, the Sheriff’s Department told Mission Local that the Feds have never gone to the trouble of serving San Francisco a warrant to obtain an inmate in custody — something other law enforcement agencies do on a daily or near-daily basis. Last week, the department told us this is still the case.
Dorsey, again, says he’s earnestly trying to solve a deadly real-life problem, not engineer a deadly political problem: “I genuinely think it’ll save lives.”
His proposed ordinance would target undocumented fentanyl dealers — but not undocumented heroin dealers. Which seems a bit perverse. But Dorsey says that disrupting the fentanyl trade and forcing the city’s drug-users back onto heroin could save hundreds of lives a year.
There is the kernel of an argument to be made there — but it’s assuming a lot that this citywide ordinance is capable of enacting a sweeping market shift. A recent study by the Cato Institute — hardly a bastion of hippy-dippy liberalism — found that the vast majority of fentanyl smuggled into the United States is done so by United States citizens.
Yes, many of the dealers in the Tenderloin and elsewhere are Latin American in origin, and presumably undocumented. But even if they’re cajoled into finding new jobs — a very big if — this would simply create an opportunity for others. There is no such thing as the American-Born Fentanyl Dealers Association, but if there was, they’d be pleased.
American cities have failed to arrest their way out of the fentanyl crisis. Or any drug crisis.
But never fear: In the not-too-distant future, San Francisco voters may yet be asked to decide if we should try to deport our way out of it.
