Five year federal sentence for thrice-deported illegal alien with 15 year record of San Francisco drug dealing
A thrice-deported illegal alien with a fifteen year track record of drug dealing in San Francisco was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for narcotics offenses today at the city’s federal courthouse.
Honduran national Jorge Rodas Salguero earlier pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute fentanyl and methamphetamine and admitted violating the terms of his probation.
“San Francisco doesn’t keep ‘em,” observed U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of her local colleagues this morning, “and we have people who come back again and again…something has to be done.”
Rodas Salguero’s charges stem from his arrest in September 2023 after he was caught dealing drugs at 7th and Mission by FBI special agents tasked with addressing the deteriorating situation in the area surrounding the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building where narcotics were being sold openly.
The defendant was seen by agents making four ‘hand-to-hand’ drug sales in the late evening of September 27 2023. Members of a Drug Enforcement Agency ‘special response team’ moved to arrest him and subsequently found him with more than half a kilo of fentanyl and substantial quantities of methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine.
“You shouldn’t smile,” Rodas Salguero told the FBI agents driving him to jail, “because people like me get out of jail eventually.”
Rodas Salguero’s lengthy record of drug convictions began in San Francisco in 2009, prosecutors told the court, and his offending stopped only when he was either in custody or removed from the country.
He was deported to Honduras in 2011, 2013 and 2016 but continually returned.
The hearing exposed a sharp division between prosecutors, who asked the court to impose a 12-year sentence, and federal probation officials who, persuaded by Rodas Salguero’s poverty-stricken upbringing in Honduras and the “non-violent” nature of the offenses, suggested an 8-year term.
“That the defendant grew up in poverty is not an excuse for a 15-year criminal rampage,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Ivana Djak in a sentencing memorandum provided to the court.
The lenient recommendation of probation staff, she wrote, “discounts the significant damage and chaos drug traffickers like the defendant have wrought on San Francisco.”
“And,” she added, “the defendant is not just any drug trafficker – he is a drug trafficker the United States government has removed repeatedly.”
“A lengthy sentence is necessary to protect the public from an individual who has thus far made a lifestyle of flouting the law,” she concluded.
The 12 year, or 144 month, term is at the low-end of the 144-175 month ‘guideline range’ for Salguero’s crimes.
In the event the debate was academic as Judge Illston imposed a significantly less severe sentence than even that envisaged by probation officials.
Today in courtroom one of San Francisco federal courthouse, Rodas Salguero, 34, received a five year sentence for his new drug dealing conviction plus a concurrent two year term for violating the terms of his supervised release.
“He has consistently been dealing drugs in the Tenderloin and is dangerous to the community for that reason,” said Judge Illston this morning.
“San Francisco doesn’t keep ‘em,” she observed, “and we have people who come back again and again…something has to be done.”
On hearing the judge’s tentative view was that a five year term was appropriate, Djak maintained her position that nothing less that 12 years would do.
“Any time he has not been in custody the people of San Francisco have been in danger,” she told the court this morning.
“If ever a guideline range was appropriate…it is appropriate here,” she added.
I want to apologize for all the harm that I have caused,” said Rodas Salguero through a Spanish interpreter today.
“I commit myself to never coming back to this country for any reason.”
Rodas Salguero did not benefit from the local U.S. Attorney’s ‘fast track’ scheme – in which predominantly illegal alien defendants were permitted to rapidly plead guilty, given short ‘time served’ sentences and referred for deportation.
Last month a court was told that approximately 130 people have been “successfully prosecuted” by federal authorities since they joined an effort to combat city drug dealing in 2023.
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