God help me, at last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump sounded like the malevolent version of my Alzheimer’s relatives. It was particularly painful to listen to.
Some good may yet come of it. His deranged statements figure to be replayed ad infinitum between now and Election Day in swing states. And some genius figured out that Trump’s interjections about eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets synced up near-perfectly with Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy.” That was welcome; we laugh so as not to cry.
Baseless claims about immigrants devouring domestic animals in Springfield, Ohio, may come off as unhinged and crazy to most voters, especially voters in a city like San Francisco. But the underlying strategy here is neither. Again and again, regardless of the question, Trump conjured up images of swarms of menacing immigrants flooding into our nation, terrorizing our citizens and taking your job. At one point, he claimed that undocumented immigrants are coming from insane asylums to take your job — which, when you think about it, doesn’t reflect very well on you.
Not quite 13 percent of San Francisco voters went for Donald Trump in 2020; his shtick, by and large, does not play here. But that’s not to say that San Francisco voters — and our elected leaders — don’t indulge in the cheap populism of viewing larger, pressing societal and/or criminal problems through the lens of immigration. We absolutely do that.
“Liberal San Francisco Is Deporting Migrants to Fight Fentanyl Crisis,” reads the headline in a recent Bloomberg article. “Liberal” seems to always be part of San Francisco’s official city title, just as “Republican Billionaire” always used to precede Donald Fisher’s name in old news articles. But, yes, we are doing that.
“For people who are willing to sell poison that is killing people, there’s no protection for you. There’s no sanctuary for you,” Mayor London Breed told Bloomberg News. “Fentanyl is such a deadly drug. It requires that we take more extreme measures.”
Sidestepping — if not contravening — this city’s sanctuary ordinance to allow federal prosecutors to threaten decades-long sentences for alleged dope dealers if they don’t agree to deportations would seem to qualify as “extreme measures.”
Let us assume that Breed and Rep. Nancy Pelosi — whom the Bloomberg article describes as inveighing upon the feds to come in and start deporting accused dope dealers — are doing this to save people’s lives; fentanyl is a scourge and San Francisco’s overdose totals are obscene. If so, however, they’ve chosen an interesting way of doing it.
Study after study after study indicates that aggressive deportations do not lower a city or region’s crime rate: In fact, the opposite is true. One’s heart needn’t bleed for fentanyl dealers; you could hope they’re stuffed into jail at such numbers their feet stick out the windows, or you could hope they’re offered alternative means to earn a living other than selling dangerous drugs. But if the goal here is protecting their clientele, there’s a mountain of data to show ramping up deportations won’t work. If you can’t arrest your way out of a drug crisis, you certainly can’t deport your way out of one.
But “liberal San Francisco” adopting “extreme measures” can accomplish other goals. Namely, it proactively mitigates the very real possibility of Kamala Harris’ old stamping ground becoming the next Springfield at a forthcoming Trump rally; immigrants are not eating pets in Ohio, but they are selling dope in San Francisco. A videographer can take a 20-minute stroll through the Tenderloin and SoMa and amass all the B-roll needed for any “do you want your home to look like this Democrat-run city?” ad campaign. This was also true in 2004 and 1984 — but it’s certainly true in 2024. And, now, fentanyl has exploded the body count and transformed drug users into grimly photogenic human question marks.
Taking “extreme measures,” however, buttresses the city against that talking point; the city can, at least, claim it’s getting tough and doing something. This, at least partially, mitigates a political problem, nationally and locally, in an election year. But it doesn’t begin to solve the problem. You can’t use immigration measures to address what is a criminal and societal issue, and adopting this framing, which is also Trump’s framing, is inherently dangerous. While many of the Tenderloin dealers are immigrants and many are undocumented, they are but one cog in a vast criminal enterprise.
An analysis by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute — not a bastion of unbridled liberalism — found that 89 percent of convicted fentanyl traffickers in 2022 were American citizens. Other salient statistics from the Cato Institute:
- In 2023, 93 percent of fentanyl seizures came at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes; U.S. citizens (who are scrutinized less) are the best smugglers;
- Nearly 99 percent of America’s fentanyl buyers are American citizens;
- At most, 0.009 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally were in possession of fentanyl.
We don’t know if Mayor Breed said “No sanctuary for you,” in a tone resembling a certain Seinfeld character. It’d be nice; we laugh so as not to cry.
One of the reasons sanctuary policies are such an easy target for the Fox News crowd — and “liberal San Francisco” officials can win points for backhanding them — is that people fundamentally don’t understand what sanctuary policies do.
Sanctuary policies do not “coddle” undocumented people. Sanctuary policies, in San Francisco and more than 400 other U.S. cities, do not prevent police from arresting undocumented people. They do not prevent district attorneys from filing charges. They do not prevent undocumented people from being sentenced to lengthy terms in jail or prison. They do not prevent undocumented people from being sentenced to death, and executed.
What do they do? They limit local law enforcement from working hand-in-hand with immigration officials and disseminating booking lists and opening jails and hospitals to federal agents. There is, again, a mountain of evidence to suggest that this limiting leads to lower crime rates and safer communities, though it does deprive politicians the election year satisfaction of crowing about deporting unsympathetic dope dealers.
A July paper from the Cato Institute — those guys again, the libertarians — found that ramping up deportations subjects the most vulnerable among us to more crime, disincentivizes them from cooperating with law enforcement, and provides negligible benefits for everyone else:
Our research studies the Secure Communities program, a federal policy that increased information sharing between local police and federal immigration authorities, thus streamlining the identification of unauthorized immigrants arrested by local police. …
Contrary to the policy’s goal of heightening enforcement to improve public safety, our analysis finds that this immigration enforcement policy increased the victimization rate of Hispanic people by 16 percent. This estimate implies that Secure Communities resulted in 1.3 million additional crimes against Hispanic people in the two years following the program’s implementation. … Our research also finds no change in the overall victimization of non-Hispanic people. …
Furthermore, our research finds that Secure Communities led to a significant decline in the rate of victims reporting crimes to the police. Hispanic people reduced their reporting rate by 30 percent. As with victimization, our results show no changes in the reporting behavior of non-Hispanic people.
Again, one’s heart needn’t bleed for fentanyl dealers. There are laws in place and victims aplenty and legal means of holding them accountable. For good or ill, however, San Francisco hasn’t been great at doing this. In the last seven trials in which accused fentanyl dealers claimed they were trafficked into the United States and coerced into selling drugs, two defendants have been found guilty, one has been acquitted and four juries deadlocked and hung. Three of these cases were subsequently dismissed, and the fourth defendant is in a diversionary program.
Perhaps this partially explains why city officials were so eager to have the feds come in and start booting people out of the country.
It is, superficially, a tough and “extreme” policy. But, seen another way, it’s the latest iteration of Mayor Breed’s counterintuitive re-election pitch: I cannot fix the problems.
We laugh so as not to cry.
Overall, “liberal” San Franciscans are not really liberal.
They take their marching orders from the top of the supposed “liberal” Democratic Party which has been largely silent about Trump and his fascistic MAGA followers’ scapegoating of immigrants for the most urgent problems America faces.
Thank you Mr. Eskenazi and Mission Local for providing some urgently needed facts.
Joe, I think there’s one important distinction between what SF is doing here and the studies you mention, which is that this is not a blanket reversal of sanctuary policy, but seemingly a rather targeted one.
Additionally, what’s not clear from this article is whether SF is arresting them and handing them over to the feds (which would be a pretty blatant violation of the ordinance), or if this is Breed and Pelosi being vocally supportive of the federally run operation to arrest drug dealers in SF.
Hi John —
The SFPD is making arrests that generate both state and federal cases. There are some DEA arrests, but many are local police.
JE
Joe, I like your work and I like you… and you’re off the mark on this one.
Yes, sanctuary city laws reduce the crime rate — but we’re not talking about repealing our sanctuary city law. We already have an exception for people who commit violent felonies. Drug dealing killed 810 of our most vulnerable people last year, many of them suffering from severe trauma. We are supposed to be a sanctuary for the most vulnerable people in our nation, and yet we let drug dealers come in and prey on them. That is a moral failing.
If we have an exception for violent felonies, we can have an exception for fentanyl dealing as well. Because it’s killing the very people we want to shelter — by the hundreds.
This isn’t about shaming people who use drugs. What people do behind closed doors is their own business… but when hard drug use spills out into hallways and streets, it’s a community problem, and we need a coordinated approach to fix it.
Now, you’re right that deportations alone — and arrests alone — will not solve the drug crisis. Neither will public health alone — Vancouver BC has tried harm reduction alone since 2006 and is now giving up.
We need a coordinated approach that’s focused on shutting down the markets. That means making it expensive to run a drug dealing business in San Francisco.
We need to go after their customers by getting them into treatment — and yes, mandated treatment does work.
We need to go after their salespeople by arresting them and jailing or deporting them or getting them into other lines of work — and yes, in SF many of our dealers are foreigners. (The statistics you cite are for the nation as a whole; the situation is different here.)
We need to go after their revenue by addressing shoplifting — and yes, diverting people into court-ordered treatment when they’re shoplifting due to drug addiction.
And we need to change the culture of hard drug use by clearing sidewalks of open drug use in Little Saigon and kids’ pathways to school — and yes, the working class families in the TL who cannot afford to move DESERVE the same clean streets my kids enjoy.
Shutting down the drug markets is not going to happen overnight — and deportations are only a small part of the solution — but I want all our options on the table.
Lets have a real conversation about how to address the drug crisis sometime — you can come to my home for chai. And let’s make sure we use accurate studies and accurate statistics that correctly reflect the problem in San Francisco.
I look forward to that conversation. I think you’ll find that we are not as far apart as you think.
They’re here illegally to begin with which cheeses off my in laws who went through the many hoops required to move here legally and they’re selling not pot but fentynal. Sorry but this is a no brainer.
Lawlessness is lawlessness .
If a petson from another country commits a crime then deport them.
Something is wrong with persons who think that these criminals who sell and distribute lethal poisons should be allowed to stay and are victims .
The penalties for drug dealers is not enough .
The Singapore model should be followed .
Zero drug addicts on the streets . Less harm ,
The babysitting and enabling of criminals in this city is wrong .
Laws are useless unless enforced .
I’d argue that Cato is actually in favor of open borders and unchecked immigration. Koch and his associates would love cheap labor and hollowing of domestic protections for workers.
The progressive shtick that every carpet bagging immigrant, deserves several hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer funded housing, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, is even more insane than any Donald Trump shtick.
No sympathy for them, election year or not. Send them away.
And then now that we are supposed to be more intelligent than generations past, let’s stop voting for the status quo and start voting with our guts…by having the guts to vote for the candidates that you actually want.
Stop letting the media dictate how you vote (L or R, red or blue). We’re not voting for gangs after all; we’re voting for leadership and that leadership vote requires risk. Why not take the risk properly?
Your constant attack articles against Farrell come across as personal. Compared to Breed, he’s a breath of fresh air, a walk in the park etc.
Also a Cal grad.
Sir or madam —
Mark Farrell went to a number of great schools, but Cal was not one of them.
Best,
JE
I am old enough to remember when the Sanctuary City laws were put in effect. The law was sold to the public ( liberal or not ) with the justification that immigrants were afraid to report crime based on their immigration status. My how that has changed. Now you commit major felony and do so with impunity. These people are selling Fentanyl. What gives them the right to sell poison? Are you telling me they can’t find work and are forced to do so? Drive by these open air drug spots. It doesn’t take a narc to see who’s slinging the dope. These kids aren’t afraid of anyone. I welcome their departure.
Are there no decent stats on what % of San Francisco’s fentanyl dealers are deportable? Cato’s numbers are nationwide.
A number of the YIMBY endorsed candidate for district supervisor are aping these same talking points. Michael Lai, Trevor Chandler, Marjan Philhour, Scotty Jacobs and Autumn Looijen all reference similar “workarounds” for SF’s Sanctuary City status in their campaign lit, at debates and forums etc. None of them has studied the law or is an attorney, so it’s clearly blustering and feeble campaign rhetoric.
About deporting fentanyl dealers. How did we wind that into the sanctuary city law. Drug dealers should be punished. Jail for 20 years would be good if we had room. Deportation is the next best thing just to get them out of here. As for the “study after study, after study” comment, was that a study of drug dealers or a study of illegal immigrants who were not drug dealers? The article was very misleading.
Carole —
If you click on the links, you get the studies. It’s that easy!
I guess “misleading” now means “I don’t agree with it.”
Yours,
JE
You wrote: “Sanctuary policies do not “coddle” undocumented people.”
This is false. The whole point of sanctuary policies is to exempt illegal immigrants from the law of the land. That is coddling by definition.
You may love the sanctuary policy; you are entitled to your opinion. But you cannot change the facts.
DO NOT FEED AND STORE THESE INDIVIDUALS IN JAIL. DEPORT THEM!
deport them… mission local is off the mark with this one