San Francisco, lengthy celebrated as a sanctuary metropolis for immigrants, is now deporting migrants arrested in drug busts because it struggles to struggle its fentanyl disaster killing lots of yearly, based on a brand new report.
Since final yr, when fentanyl killed a record-breaking 656 individuals, greater than 100 people have been charged as a part of a federal sweep in San Francisco aimed toward unlawful drug gross sales — with a lot of the felons recognized as undocumented migrants who get handed over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Bloomberg reported.
“For people who find themselves keen to promote poison that’s killing individuals, there’s no safety for you. There’s no sanctuary for you,” Mayor London Breed informed the outlet.
“Fentanyl is such a lethal drug. It requires that we take extra excessive measures,” she added.
The crackdown on migrant felons was kicked off by Ismail Ramsey, the Biden administration’s high prosecutor in Northern California.
When he took over in 2023, Ramsey directed his workplace to concentrate on low-level sellers and put an finish to the “revolving door” system that allowed criminals again out on the streets after being arrested.
The important thing to his technique lies in taking over low-level fentanyl or meth instances, providing the migrant defendants’ plea offers with a one-day prolonged sentence, and utilizing that closing day in custody handy the felons over to ICE for deportation proceedings, based on Bloomberg.
For the reason that program’s implementation, many migrants have been caught and are set to be deported, together with a 50-year-old Honduran man arrested in July for promoting $5 value of meth, based on data from Ramsey’s workplace.
Critics of this system have accused San Francisco’s high prosecutor of utilizing immigrants as a scapegoat, along with his workplace allegedly extra involved about seeing the deportations undergo than really prosecuting the crimes.
Ramsey, nonetheless, insists the technique is extra about deterrence quite than deportations.
“It’s not immigration penalties, however the specter of a probably lengthy federal sentence,” he informed Bloomberg. “It is a actual consequence to drug sellers that modifications the calculus concerning whether or not they need to return.”
San Francisco officers look like dedicated to the technique to sort out the opioid pandemic after final yr’s record-breaking 656 deaths, a 43% enhance from 2022, based on the Workplace of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The technique could also be working because the health worker’s newest report, filed in July, discovered that 293 individuals died of a fentanyl overdose since January, a drop from the earlier yr.
The town’s complete unintended overdose deaths stays excessive, with the officers estimating 412 deaths between January and July.
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