San Francisco (like Santa Monica, and others) is a “sanctuary city” with regard to illegal aliens, meaning that its city council voted in 1989 “not to cooperate with federal immigration investigations”. In other words, there is a city ordinance to break federal law, and obstruct justice, and, incredibly, the federal government puts up with it, mostly. Now the city is actually buying plane tickets and escorting criminal illegal aliens out of the country, to avoid federal investigations.
This preposterous policy has led to this ridiculous result.
San Francisco juvenile probation officials – citing the city’s immigrant sanctuary status – are protecting Honduran youths caught dealing crack cocaine from possible federal deportation and have given some offenders a city-paid flight home with carte blanche to return.The city’s practices recently prompted a federal criminal investigation into whether San Francisco has been systematically circumventing U.S. immigration law, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.
City officials say they are trying to balance their obligations under federal and state law with local court orders and San Francisco’s policies aimed at protecting the rights of the young immigrants, who they say are often victims of exploitation.
Yeah, of the pro-illegal left, who use them as political pawns for their own purposes
Federal authorities counter that drug kingpins are indeed exploiting the immigrants, but that the city’s stance allows them to get away with “gaming the system.”
Gee, d’ya think
San Francisco juvenile authorities have been grappling for several years with an influx of young Honduran immigrants dealing crack in the Mission District and Tenderloin.Those who are arrested routinely say they are minors, but police suspect that many are actually adults, living communally in Oakland and other cities at the behest of drug traffickers who claim to be their relatives.
Say it isn’t so!
Nonetheless, city authorities have typically accepted the suspects’ stories and handled the cases in Juvenile Court, where proceedings are often shielded from public scrutiny.Barred by state law from sending drug offenders to the California Youth Authority and bound by a 1989 city law defining San Francisco as a sanctuary city for immigrants – meaning officials do not cooperate with federal immigration investigations – juvenile officials settled on an unorthodox strategy.
This is really incomprehensible. What can it mean that a city law can instruct city officials to break federal law? Why do the feds allow this? I’m afraid I know the answer, and I don’t like it much.
Rather than have the drug offenders deported, they have recommended that Juvenile Court judges and commissioners approve city-paid flights home to Honduras for the offenders with the aim of reuniting them with their families.
The irony. Homeless citizens who pay sales tax in San Francisco are funding the plane flights they cannot afford themselves, for illegal aliens who compete with them for city services.
The practice, federal authorities say, does nothing to prevent offenders from coming back, while federal deportation legally bars them from ever returning. Federal officials also say U.S. law prohibits helping an illegal immigrant to cross the border, even if it is to return home.Federal officials recently detained a San Francisco juvenile probation officer at the Houston airport, where he was accompanying [emphasis mine] two Honduran juvenile drug offenders about to board a flight to Tegucigalpa.
I don’t understand: were the two misguided miscreants about to sing something? I’ve always loved music in the airport, myself.
Do we need a new version of the Mann Act, this one making it illegal to transport illegal aliens across international boundaries for political purposes? Oh, wait, we already have that, in current federal law. We just don’t seem to be willing to enforce it.
July 1st, 2008 6:44 pm
Yes, it is indeed unbelievable…