SF prisons rarely work with ICE. Should the fentanyl crisis change that?

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Paul Miyamoto recalls that in his first two years as the sheriff of San Francisco, he agreed to help the federal immigration authorities only once.

The man they were looking for, Miyamoto says, was a repeat offender who was accused of breaking into the house while someone was inside and bringing a firearm.

So when US Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested a date for the man’s release, the sheriff agreed.

But Miyamoto doesn’t think ICE even came to pick him up.

“We don’t have an everyday relationship [with ICE],” Miyamoto told The Standard in a recent interview. “I think we literally took them by surprise because, to be honest, they usually don’t get notifications from us.”

The sheriff’s brief interaction with ICE was an anomaly in the sanctuary city, which protects non-citizens from deportation by requiring prisons to largely ignore ICE requests for prisoner release dates.

The law only allows him to notify ICE in advance in narrow circumstances, such as when the person is a repeat offender convicted of a serious or violent crime, such as murder or auto theft.

But the deadly fentanyl crisis in San Francisco could change that.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey introduced legislation this week that would allow San Francisco to help ICE deport some unregistered fentanyl traffickers in the face of an epidemic that has killed more than 1,400 people since 2020.

Dorsey’s proposal would allow the sheriff to notify ICE to release a noncitizen from prison if that person has been convicted of a felony dealing in fentanyl in the past seven years and the judge has found enough evidence to believe they have committed the same crime again.

Dorsey hopes his plan will “de-incentivize” illegal dealers to sell fentanyl.

While he doesn’t know how many dealers are non-citizens, Dorsey said it shouldn’t matter. Even if none of them are non-citizens, he said his law would be a useful “preventive strategy.” It is commonly believed that many street vendors are Honduran citizens in the US illegally.

“We need to get rid of the idea that there must be a panacea that will solve everything,” Dorsey said in an interview with The Standard. “It will be 100 unsatisfactory increments that will get us moving in the right direction. But if we don’t, we should try.”

But critics doubt that threats of deportation will discourage non-citizen dealers from selling fentanyl. They say the law does nothing to address why undocumented people sell drugs in San Francisco in the first place—often because they’re trying to survive after fleeing gang violence and other unrest in their countries.

“Just as the death penalty is not a deterrent, the threat of deportation will not hinder U.S. suppliers or reduce demand for fentanyl,” said former supervisor John Avalos, author of a 2013 law preventing San Francisco from notifying ICE in most cases. release from prison.

For Bill Ong Hing, a professor of immigration law at the University of San Francisco who helped develop the city’s original asylum policy in the 1980s, the Dorsey Act is just another example of a politician blaming immigrants for a problem that deportation won’t solve.

“Democrats and Republicans have always benefited from having immigrants become scapegoats,” Hing told The Standard. “I’ve seen it throughout my career and it definitely falls right into that category.”

It is unclear how widespread the impact of the Dorsey legislation would be.

The number of times federal immigration authorities have asked Miyamoto to notify them before a prisoner is released has increased from less than 250 requests in 2021 to more than 500 last year, according to his office.

This year, the sheriff received about 70 inquiries.

It is not known if any of these requests are for individuals that the sheriff would be allowed to report to ICE if the Dorsey Act was passed.

This is far from the first time that the crisis has prompted San Francisco to rethink its defensive measures.

In 2008, an undocumented young man from El Salvador with a violent past fatally shot and killed a man and his two sons in an Excelsior. The bloodshed by suspected MS-13 gang member Edwin Ramos led then-Mayor Gavin Newsom to weaken the city’s youth protections.

Seven years later, the cycle repeated itself: a homeless Mexican citizen fired a bullet that ricocheted off the ground and hit a woman walking with her father on the San Francisco pier. The murder of Kate Steinle made the city and its sanctuary a target for Fox News and Donald Trump.

The problem with every exemption San Francisco makes to protect its safe haven, Hing says, is that allowing any local collaboration with ICE can discourage immigrants from going to the police even if they become victims or witnesses of a crime. Building on that trust is at the heart of why San Francisco passed its asylum laws in the first place.

Hing said the city should instead focus on advising and working with non-citizen dealers to steer them away from selling fentanyl. He runs a program that does just that with recommendations from the public defender’s office and the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.

“We have a very good success rate,” Hing said. “We’re proud of that fact, that’s how you get them off the street.”

Dorsey’s legislation is one of two pushes in one week to create exceptions to San Francisco’s asylum policy.

Before Dorsey announced his plans, London Mayor Breed and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins asked permission to cooperate with immigration authorities in two specific cases involving the murder and rape of children.

Federal authorities have discovered that the suspects in both cases are hiding in Mexico, Jenkins said, but will not send them to San Francisco for prosecution unless the city agrees to notify ICE if they are released.

The district attorney’s request is also not unprecedented.

In 2019, then-District Attorney George Gascon sought a similar exemption for a similar request by the federal authorities to make the same request for the extradition of an accused rapist from Tunisia.

In the end, the suspect was sent to San Francisco without any change in the law, raising concerns that the Trump administration was “playing politics” with the asylum policy.

The exceptions sought by Dorsey and Jenkins require the approval of the Supervisory Board. They have an uphill battle to get there.

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