End-to-end SFPD involvement in foreign drug dealer deportation strategy underscores futility of sanctuary law façade
This article is also available in Spanish.
Ordinarily an illegal alien fentanyl dealer caught by police plying his trade on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district won’t find themselves facing deportation. After a brief stay in county jail they will be released by a superior court judge and able to return to their work.
Traffickers like Angel Reyes – a 22-year-old Honduran – were protected by city ‘sanctuary’ laws from being handed over to immigration authorities for removal. That’s why, despite being arrested seven times in the last three-and-a-half years for drug dealing in San Francisco, and twice more in Oakland, Reyes was always promptly freed and able to go straight back to slinging fentanyl.
But today more such traffickers are facing the prospect of removal. Greater involvement by federal authorities has increased somewhat the numbers of foreigners sent home – some after serving prison terms of moderate length, others being deported in as little as four weeks.
A little-noticed aspect of this deportation drive is the extent to which SFPD officers are embedded at every stage. Notionally forbidden from assisting in offenders’ deportation, they nonetheless investigate the cases, make the arrests and author the affidavits that initiate many federal prosecutions that lead directly to removals.
However because they wear a second hat, and are described as being members of an ad hoc ‘federal task force’, sanctuary ordinances are successfully skirted – albeit via the most convoluted process of which it is possible to conceive.
In early 2023 city leaders found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand they were besieged by battalions of fentanyl-peddling foreigners, whose efforts were not only contributing to San Francisco’s 800 plus overdose deaths each year, but also attracting a rising chorus of complaint from residents. On the other, they were incapable of mounting an effective response as they remained in thrall to progressive activists, whose dedication to protecting criminal aliens was undiminished – and so the city continued to ban police officers and sheriff’s deputies from working with those who might send the Hondurans home.
The ‘revolving door’ at the city’s Hall of Justice, and local judges’ tendency to allow traffickers like Angel Reyes to be repeatedly released, only added to a sense of lawlessness on the streets.
The circle was squared with a plea to federal officials for help. Last year Mayor London Breed appealed to newly-installed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, Ismail Ramsey, accurately observing in a letter to him that “the scale of the problem is beyond our local capacity,” while less-precisely insisting that the city “is doing everything it can to address these public safety challenges.”
A nod was as good as a wink to the U.S. Attorney’s office who, plainly appreciating the tacit invitation to crack heads, conjured-up a deportation-focused law enforcement strategy.
A major aspect of this was a so-called “fast track”scheme which aimed to round up Honduran dealers, quickly secure guilty pleas under threat of punitive sentences if convicted, and have then handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in as little as one month.
One of the first to be dealt with under the fast track scheme was Candy Cardona Zuniga who pleaded guilty to ‘possession with intent to distribute’ after being arrested with 148 grams of fentanyl and 52 grams of heroin on Eddy Street on August 2 last year. 28 days later, the 18-year old Honduran girl found herself being sentenced in federal court and was removed so quickly that neither the deputy public defender nor the assistant district attorney in her state drugs case realized she had gone when they appeared in San Francisco Superior Court one week later.
Franklin Hernandez-Cruz violently resisted attempts by police to arrest him on August 24, it eventually taking 30 officers from numerous agencies to place him in custody and quell the racous crowd who, in the commotion, stole narcotics and cash that was thrown to the ground. Less than two months after his arrest he sat in an immigration detention facility in McFarland, California awaiting deportation to Honduras, having pleaded guilty to a drugs offense.
The program’s effectiveness in curbing the apparently endless numbers of foreign nationals available to sell narcotics remains in doubt.
Figures provided this month to a federal judge reveal that 54 convictions have been obtained since the ‘fast track’ scheme was instigated. Two of these were U.S. citizens and one was a green card holder. Of the others, 20 have been deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the rest are either awaiting deportation of are otherwise in immigration proceedings.
Federal prosecutors have ‘adopted’ a further 50 or so non-fast track drugs cases.
But this federal endeavor has nevertheless come at extraordinary cost: from law enforcement and prosecutorial resources diverted from the serious violent and white collar crimes on which they are usually focused, to the obvious rancor created by federal judges’ markedly differing approaches to whether and to what extent they intend to cooperate with the fast track program. At times the federal courthouse has seemed to creak at the seams from the number of solely-Spanish-speaking drugs defendants.
Given this enormous effort being made to remedy San Francisco’s self-inflicted misery, city residents might raise an eyebrow when they find that many of these federal drugs prosecutions are cases where suspects are investigated by SFPD, arrested by SFPD, and who are put directly in front of a federal judge on the basis of an affidavit sworn to by an SFPD officer – fully aware that the dealer in question will, more likely than not, simply be dispatched to Honduras post-haste.
So in order to do an end run around the sanctuary ordinances, and protect city elites’ view of themselves as kind compassionate people, and save themselves from activists’ wrath, a system has been cobbled together to do at great expense in money, time and convenience what could otherwise be easily accomplished for cents on the dollar by local law enforcement who are doing it in any event.
Fabian Godoy, a 23-year-old Honduran, was spied making hand-to-hand drug sales by SFPD officers using high-powered binoculars from a hidden vantage point in the Tenderloin. They directed SFPD colleagues to the intersection of McAllister and Leavenworth Streets to arrest the suspect. After a brief foot chase Godoy was detained and found to have a variety of drugs including fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine.
One month later a federal prosecution against Godoy was initiated on the basis of an eight-page affidavit provided to a U.S. Magistrate Judge. That document was authored by a sergeant in SFPD’s narcotics unit, Dominic Discenza, who is a 25-year veteran of the department.
Godoy first appeared in federal court on January 25 2024. He was sentenced this afternoon to a ‘time served plus one day’ term by U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney on the understanding that he would imminently be handed over to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The judge had earlier expressed misgivings about the sentence and demanded prosecutors return with more details of the defendant’s rap sheet and immigration history.
Similarly on November 30 2023 – one week before Godoy’s arrest – Juan Carlos Zapata Pena was arrested by SFPD officers on the 400 block of Hyde Street. An affidavit – again authored by SFPD veteran Discenza – states that an SFPD officer, using binoculars, saw the defendant selling drugs.
The officer directed SFPD colleagues to move in and make the arrest. A search of the defendant turned-up fentanyl., cocaine, methamphetamine and oxycodone, along with cash and a digital scale. Discenza’s affidavit, requesting that the court issues a complaint, was signed by a federal judge on December 29 2023.
Zapata Pena pleaded guilty before Judge Vince Chhabria on January 31 2024 – 62 days after his arrest and was that day sentenced to ‘time served plus one day’ and handed over to ICE.
For a department notionally prohibited from facilitating deportations, these are examples of what amounts to really quite a lot of departmental involvement in a law enforcement exercise that leads directly and more-or-less immediately to the deportation of unlucky dealers.
Proponents say that sanctuary ordinances are necessary to ensure illegal aliens trust the police and have confidence to approach them if needed. But if SFPD officers skirt those rules, which they do in spirit if not in letter, because they are driving these deportations in every practical way that matters, then observers might be entitled to ask: what is the point of it all?
They might wonder how much time, effort and money could be saved by not going through the whole rigmarole of involving federal prosecutors and, instead, simply allow local officials to refer criminal foreigners to ICE directly – and have the whole drugs crisis done within six months.
But as San Francisco elites’ commitment to their sanctuary laws survived the death of Kate Steinle – who died in her father’s arms after being shot by an illegal alien let out of SF county jail instead of being deported – this is an argument unlikely to win favor.
A glance at an arrest log from the Tenderloin last month suggests that, eight months in, the supply of “no local” or “transient” dealers available to distribute drugs and be arrested remains high.
Until sanctuary policies are addressed it seems likely that attempts to suppress street criminality will meet with only limited success.
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