Sanctuary Silly

SF used to have a rather, you should pardon the phrase, liberal immigration policy, whereby illegal immigrant juveniles arrested in the City would be hidden from the feds. In some cases, the juvies (some of whom turned out to be adults) were shipped out of town and sometimes out of the country. There were even cases where city social workers were flying down to Central America - on our dime! - to take the delinquents "home." I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. The program stopped after one of these Oppressed Angels killed a local butcher and his three sons in a drive-by.

Now, we have a report setting out the number of juvenile delinquents who were helped with this program: S.F. sanctuary policy shielded up to 185 youths

As many as 185 undocumented youths held on felony criminal charges in San Francisco were shielded from deportation between 2005 and last summer, when the controversial policy came to light, according to juvenile probation statistics obtained by The Chronicle.

City officials had previously said they had no way of telling how many youths had benefited from the policy. But a new preliminary report prepared by the Juvenile Probation Department at the request of Supervisor David Campos shows the number is much higher than previously suspected.

The report shows that between Jan. 1, 2005, and Feb. 28 of this year, 252 undocumented youths had cases in the juvenile probation system.

It also shows 67 have been turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials since July when The Chronicle revealed that the city was paying for flights home and $7,000-a-month group homes for the young offenders instead of turning them over to federal officials. It's unclear how many, if any, of those 67 ultimately were deported.

I know SF has a reputation as a liberal place, but this is madness. It's one thing to try to skirt federal law for the sake of the proto-typical "man with 10 kids who's been here for 30 years," but these are just thugs. There is no rational reason why they should have been getting this level of assistance. What's odd is that there is some sort of Honduras connection in all this:

Advocates say it's true the youths are being picked up on serious charges, but that the mayor is missing the bigger point: The youths are being trafficked from Honduras and are made to sell drugs in the Tenderloin to pay back their traffickers for bringing them here in the first place.

The trafficking of youths from Honduras to San Francisco to sell drugs has been documented in media reports dating back to the early 1990s. Angela Chan, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said the mayor's time and resources would be better directed at breaking up these drug rings.

"Who is bringing these youth to this country? Who is supplying them with these drugs? That's the unanswered question," she said. "I don't want drugs in my community either, but I don't think it helps what we're doing to this group of youth."

Great, so the City was enabling a criminal network involved in human trafficking, drug dealing, and child abuse. Note the smokescreen from Chan: Bust the dealers, not the kids! That's typical "root cause" blather from a progressive who doesn't want to solve the problem. It's unclear whether the supposed drug bosses are in the City, or even in the country.

In the meantime, there has been a silver lining:

The percentage of youths at juvenile hall who are undocumented has dropped considerably - from 31.3 percent in July to only 6.4 percent on March 17.

Wow! It's almost like enforcing the law worked, or something!

There's a lot of pompous talk about "patriotic immigrants" and "un-American police tactics" coming from the pro-illegal immigrant side. That's fine for law-abiding immigrants. But why they feel compelled to flout federal law and fly people to Honduras - something they would never do for you or me - is beyond comprehension.