San Francisco, long celebrated as a sanctuary city for immigrants, is now deporting migrants arrested in drug busts as it struggles to fight its fentanyl crisis killing hundreds every year, according to a new report.
Since last year, when fentanyl killed a record-breaking 656 people, more than 100 individuals have been charged as part of a federal sweep in San Francisco aimed at illegal drug sales — with most of the felons identified as undocumented migrants who get handed over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Bloomberg reported.
“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 the outlet.
“Fentanyl is such a deadly drug. It requires that we take more extreme measures,” she added.
The crackdown on migrant felons was kicked off by Ismail Ramsey, the Biden administration’s top prosecutor in Northern California.
When he took over in 2023, Ramsey directed his office to focus on low-level dealers and put an end to the “revolving door” system that allowed criminals back out on the streets after being arrested.
The key to his strategy lies in taking up low-level fentanyl or meth cases, offering the migrant defendants’ plea deals with a one-day extended sentence, and using that final day in custody to hand the felons over to ICE for deportation proceedings, according to Bloomberg.
Since the program’s implementation, many migrants have been caught and are set to be deported, including a 50-year-old Honduran man arrested in July for selling $5 worth of meth, according to records from Ramsey’s office.
Critics of the program have accused San Francisco’s top prosecutor of using immigrants as a scapegoat, with his office allegedly more concerned about seeing the deportations go through than actually prosecuting the crimes.
Ramsey, however, insists the strategy is more about deterrence rather than deportations.
“It is not immigration consequences, but the threat of a potentially long federal sentence,” he told Bloomberg. “This is a real consequence to drug dealers that changes the calculus regarding whether they want to return.”
San Francisco officials appear to be committed to the strategy to tackle the opioid pandemic after last year’s record-breaking 656 deaths, a 43% increase from 2022, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The strategy may be working as the medical examiner’s latest report, filed in July, found that 293 people died of a fentanyl overdose since January, a drop from the previous year.
The city’s total accidental overdose deaths remains high, with the officials estimating 412 deaths between January and July.
