18-year-old is latest drug dealer to be ‘fast tracked’ back to Honduras
An 18-year-old Honduran will be handed over to immigration officials for deportation after pleading guilty to drug dealing in San Francisco – just a month after being arrested by SFPD officers.
Mario Galeas-Morales is the latest illegal alien to be dealt with under a ‘fast track’ scheme devised by federal prosecutors to rapidly remove certain ‘low level’ dealers from city streets. Defendants are given the opportunity to plead guilty, be handed a time served sentence, and be sent for deportation at a single hearing.
He was arrested just before 11pm on March 20 after police officers were troubled to see him riding a scooter on a Tenderloin sidewalk. In addition to having an outstanding warrant, Galeas-Morales had cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and a digital scale in a backpack.
He pleaded guilty today to possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine before U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney. The judge imposed a time served plus one day sentence.
The court was told that the defendant had previously been arrested for dealing fentanyl and methamphetamine in July last year at 7th and Mission Streets. That arrest came less than a week after his 18th birthday.
Galeas-Morales was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol officers in Arizona in July 2021. Two weeks later he was released to the custody of his sister in Oakland, California.
Figures provided to a federal judge last month revealed that, in the eight months since the program’s inception, 54 fast track convictions had been secured and 20 defendants had actually been deported.
The program has received a mixed reception from federal judges. While many have been perfectly content to go along with the scheme some have balked at the lenient treatment they were being expected to mete out. A generally skeptical Judge Chesney agreed to today’s disposal “in this instance – given that he does not have prior convictions, given his youth and the fact that he will be deported.”
“You have your whole life ahead of you,” the judge told Galeas-Morales. “Drug dealing in the USA, even if it looks like an easy way to make an easy amount of money, is not the way to live it.”
