Will Trump end the flow of fentanyl? Here’s how his executive orders could affect SF

President Donald Trump wasted no time issuing a flurry of executive orders after his inauguration Monday.

Many delivered on campaign promises to tamp down illegal immigration and attack the “woke” agenda. The controversial measures are sure to spark legal battles — some already have — but nonetheless signal the start of a seismic shift in White House policy. 

Here’s a rundown of how some of the orders could affect San Francisco.

Trump on Monday ordered the construction of a border wall and told the military to “seal the borders,” citing a “large-scale invasion” of foreign criminals trafficking “deadly narcotics and other illicit materials.”

Could the policies stymie the flow of fentanyl into San Francisco? Probably not, experts say.

“The border is porous to drugs because the border is porous to free trade,” said Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of family community medicine at UCSF who has written extensively about the narcotics trade.

Most illicit narcotics enter the U.S. through established ports of entry, Ciccarone said; traffickers store drugs in hidden compartments of trucks that carry legal goods across the border.

He added that narcotics are rarely smuggled by people crossing remote stretches of desert on foot — the focus of Trump’s immigration policies. 

“There’s a little bit of mythology about the mules who swallow the drugs,” Ciccarone said. “But if that’s still happening, it’s a small part of the trade.”

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor who studies illicit drugs, said one border measure that might make a difference is the implementation of technology that can rapidly scan trucks for secret cargo. Still, he said, “the return on investment dissipates very quickly after routine enforcement.”

OK, fine, but Trump also designated international drug cartels as terrorist organizations. Could that stop the flow of fentanyl?

Again, probably not.

“It just comes down to the basics,” Ciccarone said. “Is that just rhetoric, or can we put some teeth into that?”

Any successful cartel crackdown would require Mexican law enforcement to work with U.S. authorities, he said. But even that might not work.

Mexican law enforcement, Humphreys said, “is not that powerful. Maybe they could take down one cartel if they put all their resources into it.”

The best way to stop the flow of drugs across the border is to end “the demand problem,” Ciccarone said. That means investing in U.S. treatment and recovery programs.

“I want supply control to be successful,” he added of Trump’s policies, but “the odds are against them.”

One of Trump’s most controversial orders is an effort to end the legal right to citizenship of any child born on U.S. soil, regardless of the parents’ immigration status.

The executive order is sure to face a lengthy legal battle, which has already started thanks to a 22-state lawsuit joined by California.

Most legal experts agree that birthright citizenship is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, established in part by an 1898 Supreme Court ruling in the case of a San Francisco-born man of Chinese heritage.

But what if Trump’s order passes?

It could have drastic effects in the Bay Area, which is home to a large number of skilled workers on H-1B visas, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Trump’s order axes birthright citizenship in two scenarios: 1) When a child’s mother is “unlawfully” in the U.S. and the father is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident, and 2) when the mother is in the U.S. lawfully but temporarily (this would include H-1B workers)  and the father is not a citizen or permanent resident. 

Bill Ong Hing, a professor and associate dean at the University of San Francisco School of Law, said children born in either of those scenarios would technically be subject to deportation. His “hunch” is that children of H-1B workers could be folded into their parents’ visa packages, but he added that the Trump administration has outlined few specifics.

“It is confusing,” Hing said. “The bottom line for me in all of this is that they can’t do that.”

Wading directly into the culture wars, Trump ordered the federal government to “recognize two sexes, male and female.”

“Ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women,” his order states.

The order mandates that passport and visa applications no longer offer an “X” option in the gender field. It is unclear what that means for people who currently hold documents with that status.

Local politicians were quick to attack the order.

“It’s hard to overstate how radical this is,” state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote on X. “A government dictate that a class of people simply doesn’t exist.”

A handful of people with San Francisco ties will benefit from Trump’s blanket pardon of more than 1,000 rioters convicted or suspected of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

One of those is Frank Peter Molinari Giorgi Jr., 36, whose family has made celebrated Italian sausages in San Francisco for generations. The salami scion was charged this month with assaulting police officers during the insurrection.

Another is Daniel Goodwyn, 36, a self-proclaimed member of the Proud Boys militia and recently elected president of the San Francisco chapter of the California Republican Assembly.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, Mariposa Castro of Gilroy, Daniel Shaw of Santa Rosa, and Evan Neumann of Mill Valley will likely be included in Trump’s pardon.