Fugitive Honduran who dealt drugs for years in San Francisco sent back to Texas after legal wrangling

February 21, 2025

The determination of a federal judge in Texas to prevent the risk that a federal judge in San Francisco would release an illegal alien drug dealer led to her issuing an order reversing the decision – only for the San Francisco judge to protest that she hadn’t inked any such order and was still mulling the case over.

Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses, of the Western District of Texas, acted last Friday to recover Honduran national Abel Zuniga-Navarro – a narcotics trafficker whom she had jailed in Del Rio, TX for immigration offenses and who was then deported in 2021.

He immediately returned to the U.S., this time to San Francisco, where he was arrested multiple times for peddling fentanyl, most recently in 2024, but was continually returned to the streets by superior court judges. On belatedly realizing that he had come back, and hence violated his probation terms, federal officials in Texas sought his return.

He was arrested on February 11 2025 and brought to court.

At San Francisco federal courthouse last Friday U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler was told by the defendant’s attorney that, because of a legal technicality – facts alleged in a warrant were not sworn under penalty of perjury – the court had no jurisdiction over him and he should be immediately freed.

The defendant’s attorney also said that the supervised release term imposed in Texas had expired and that federal probation officials could have moved to arrest him earlier, but it was too late now.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Yeh’s position was that, even if the warrant was not valid in the ninth circuit, which demands sworn facts, it was valid in Texas, which is in the fifth circuit and has different rules – and that was what mattered.

“Because the defendant has not identified any valid ground for the warrant to be disregarded the defendant should be transferred back to the Western District of Texas where he can challenge the warrant before the judge that issued it,” Yeh wrote in a court filing.

Hours after that hearing concluded federal prosecutors in Texas told Judge Moses that Zuniga-Navarro had been ordered released by Magistrate Judge Beeler and Moses immediately ordered it reversed.

In fact, Judge Beeler had made no such order and she took pains to make that clear in an impromptu late afternoon filing on the case docket where she pointed out that no release order had been issued and set a new hearing to review the issue.

At a final hearing today at San Francisco federal courthouse Judge Beeler ordered Zuniga-Navarro to be detained and instructed the U.S. Marshals to send him to the Western District of Texas.

Judge Moses is an arch-critic of Bay Area ‘sanctuary’ laws. In 2022 she condemned them as she sentenced Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate – the illegal alien who killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle in 2015 – to two years’ imprisonment for violating the terms of his supervised release in a 2011 case.

“[T]he reason he’s sitting here with a murder allegation in his petition is because of a sanctuary city called San Francisco,” said the judge at Garcia-Zarate’s sentencing – refusing his request that she recommend a prison in Nevada.

“No. I’m not doing that again. This man is [not going] to get the benefit of any sanctuary laws anymore because we know that whether he’s shooting at a bird or he’s shooting at a pier, he’s a dangerous person to be walking around in our community.”

“So, no, I won’t recommend any sanctuary city or sanctuary area…anything in the Ninth Circuit,” she concluded.

Alia Moses, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Texas

After being deported in October 2021, Abel almost immediately returned – making his way to the more hospitable climes of San Francisco and promptly going back to drug dealing.

He was arrested on December 14 2021 for dealing fentanyl and heroin in the city’s Tenderloin district and then released almost immediately with an ankle monitor.

This was too inconvenient for Navarro, who sent his attorneys to court to have this restriction relaxed.

“Mr Navarro,” wrote city public defender Dustin Latka in May 2022, “respectfully requests that the court allow him to continue to demonstrate his law-abiding life without GPS monitoring.”

“He is currently living in San Francisco and doing his best to succeed and work hard,” he noted.

He ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of ‘accessory after the fact’ and, on February 24 2023 was given a suspended sentence and told to stay out of parts of the Tenderloin and SOMA districts.

In February 2024 he was arrested for selling drugs at the intersection of Leavenworth and Geary Streets which – to Zuniga-Navarro’s credit – was one block north of the area he had been ordered not to go.