San Francisco to Halt 'Sanctuary' Policy

[Woodmonkey]

LOS ANGELES, July 2 -- San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that the city would begin handing over for deportation juvenile illegal immigrants with drug convictions, reversing a controversial policy of flying the youths back to their home countries at the city's expense.

The flights, rooted in a 1989 ordinance declaring the city a "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants, ceased this spring after the U.S. attorney threatened to prosecute officials for harboring criminals.

About the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained a city probation official in the Houston airport along with two Honduran juveniles the official was putting on a plane to Tegucigalpa, the capital.

"Which means that San Francisco for all intents and purposes is running its own department of immigration," said Joseph Russoniello, the U.S. attorney for San Francisco. "It's had its own foreign policy, so having its own immigration policy is the next step."

Newsome took responsibility for the embarrassment Wednesday, a day after the controversy overshadowed the popular Democrat's announcement that he's considering running for the governor's seat when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger's term expires in 2010.

"We're going to fix this," Newsom said.

The controversy, coming in a presidential election campaign in which polls show immigration ranks high as an incendiary issue, highlighted starkly different perspectives both on immigration and on notions of victimhood.

City probation officials described the juvenile offenders in achingly sympathetic terms, emphasizing the chain of circumstances that led to them selling crack cocaine on the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

"These kids have really been victimized, most of our clients," said Patricia Lee, who manages the public defender office for juvenile court. "They come from incredibly dire circumstances. Their families are starving."

Lee said drug lords sometimes promise the youths construction jobs in California, then force them into "slave labor" retailing drugs. "They're not murderers, they're not rapists," she said. "They're trying to survive and their families live under threat of harm.

"We have a duty to defend these kids, zealously."

A similar emphasis on compassion underpins the sanctuary ordinance, which bars San Francisco officials from cooperating with federal immigration officials to deport undocumented immigrants.

But the lengths the city went to on behalf of the convicted Central American youths provoked intense and embarrassing national interest after being reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday.

"I don't think it's an appropriate practice, and we rightly ended it. Period," Newsom said Tuesday, when he initially put responsibility on "the courts," the district attorney and the probation commission, whose members the mayor appoints.

Compounding the embarrassment was the city's fallback position: sending convicted Honduran juveniles to a group home in Southern California. Within 10 days of arriving at the unguarded facility, all eight had run away.

"These unfortunate escapes are unacceptable and are producing no intended results and creating unintended consequences," Newsom said. "And so that practice has also stopped. We did this two days ago."

Still, there was sharp criticism from officials in San Bernardino County, to which the youths escaped.

"We simply don't want them dumped into our community," said Arden Wiltshire, a sheriff's department spokeswoman. "And to top it all off, they're sent away from their probation officers, who they're supposed to report to."

Newsom, who said the city spent $2.3 million housing convicted youths, gave up trying to reconcile the famously liberal city's sanctuary ordinance with its obligations under state and federal law. "Adults who commit felonies are already turned over to the federal authorities for deportation," he said, noting that the sanctuary policy was "designed to protect our residents" and "is not a shield for criminal behavior."

U.S. Attorney Russoniello pointed out that the federal system is not heartless. He said three "very robust" federal task forces on human trafficking exist to help exploited youths brought into the country for criminal enterprises.

The Source