The Trump administration has long blamed sanctuary cities as one of the main impediments to its mass deportation regime. To an extent, President Trump and his lieutenants are right. Policies like San Francisco’s Sanctuary Ordinance do hinder the president’s anti-immigrant agenda — if we’re talking about the deportation of law-abiding undocumented immigrants or those arrested for mundane misdemeanors like DUIs.
However, the administration is dead wrong to blame sanctuary policies for protecting the undocumented drug dealers responsible for the epidemic of fentanyl overdoses in the city. In fact, San Francisco’s sanctuary policies present no legal obstacle to deporting such criminals. Indeed, they help law enforcement investigate and prosecute them. There’s no need to revise the city’s sanctuary law to kick these dealers out of the country.
We just need to enforce the law.
Sanctuary laws help keep not just the foreign-born but all of us safe. It’s much more difficult to arrest criminals in the absence of sanctuary protections, because undocumented witnesses are afraid to testify against them. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement is serious about targeting hardened criminals within the undocumented population, as it has claimed, it’s going to need the help of local law enforcement officers, who, in turn, will need the cooperation of crime victims. The victims of gangs like MS-13 often live within immigrant communities. Nobody in those communities is going to talk to local cops who they suspect are working with ICE.
At the same time, San Francisco’s sanctuary law specifically allows local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities if someone has been convicted of certain felonies — including drug dealing. There’s nothing in the law to prevent the city from referring such cases to ICE. The only hindrances are procedural.
San Francisco public defenders routinely ask that charges against drug dealers be switched to charges that are “immigration safe,” meaning they’re not on the list of felonies that would trigger federal deportation. “Accessory after the fact” is one such common plea. The idea is to make sure that people aren’t being doubly punished for their crimes — first on a criminal charge, second on a civil violation. Public defenders and DAs are both required by state law to take the punitive consequences of clients’ immigration status into account when evaluating their legal options, and the DA often agrees to such deals to avoid the uncertainty of going to trial. On a list of more than 300 narcotics cases over the last five months that I received from the DA’s office, more than half ended in an “accessory after the fact” charge as a result of plea deals.
But this arrangement, meant to protect immigrants from unduly harsh punishments, often translates to impunity for drug dealers who deserve no such consideration. Lesser charges come with lesser consequences — or often, in San Francisco, no consequences. Drug dealers and their lawyers know how to game this system to keep the dealers out of jail and on the street.
The solution is simple: The DA must stop accepting plea deals when the defendant is a full-time drug dealer, even if it means going to trial. Undocumented drug dealers do not deserve the legal protections our system affords to law-abiding, hard-working immigrants.
Some advocates argue that the dealers deserve our compassion, because they are hapless victims of human trafficking. The SF public defender’s office, for example, insists that many dealers are trafficking victims brought to the U.S. under false pretenses, and that they or their families could be killed if they refuse to sell drugs. In the last two years, out of seven cases the public defender has brought to court using this defense, two were convicted, one was acquitted, and the rest ended in hung juries.
Beyond this scant and ambiguous evidence, there’s little reason to believe this narrative.
Numerous sources — including former addicts and a former upper-echelon drug trafficker who have done extensive business with San Francisco’s Honduran drug dealers — have told me they have never heard of anyone being lured to the city under false pretenses and forced to sell drugs. Nor do cops hear such claims on wiretaps. This is likely just a line that dealers tell their lawyers, and the lawyers tell the courts, to solicit leniency.
Most of the full-time dealers in downtown San Francisco are supplied by the Sinaloa drug cartel, which also works to smuggle them into the United States. The dealers are on the hook to pay back the cartel for the expense of getting them here, but that’s an agreement they likely enter into voluntarily. As the Chronicle has reported, the dealers largely hail from a single valley in Honduras peppered with new mansions festooned with the logos of San Francisco sports teams, built with the profits from the city’s drug trade. Former dealers there told the Chronicle in 2023 that San Francisco is a popular place to sell drugs because its sanctuary policies shield them from deportation.
But our sanctuary laws don’t have to provide a get-out-of-jail-free card for drug pushers. There’s no contradiction between upholding San Francisco’s sanctuary status and pushing for deportations of undocumented drug dealers. There’s no need to scrap or reform the city’s immigration policies.
All we have to do is enforce the law and send dealers packing.
Leighton Woodhouse is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker in Oakland. He writes the Substack newsletter Social Studies.