How death that shamed San Francisco set stage for city’s takeover by illegal alien drug dealers and a decade of self-inflicted misery
“The reason he’s sitting here with a murder allegation in his petition is because of a sanctuary city called San Francisco,” observed Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses, of the Western District of Texas, who did not mince her words when sentencing Jose Inez Garcia Zarate in 2022.
The defendant before her was the illegal immigrant remarkably acquitted of murder after he fatally shot 32-year-old Kate Steinle on San Francisco’s Embarcadero on July 1 2015. He was on the streets that day because sheriff’s officials released him from jail – ignoring a request from immigration authorities to be notified so they could arrange his deportation.
His one state conviction, for firearms possession, was reversed on appeal.
He was ultimately sent back to Texas to face the incredulous judge because his actions breached conditions imposed following a 2011 federal conviction there.
Judge Moses excoriated the City by the Bay when she was asked by Garcia-Zarate’s attorney to recommend that he serve his sentence in a prison in Nevada.
“No. I’m not doing that again,” she told them. “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.”
Two weeks after completing his sentence, on February 16 2024, Garcia-Zarate was deported, for the sixth time, to Mexico.
He is probably already back in the United States.
It is hardly a surprise that it took a federal judge in Texas to voice concerns about San Francisco’s sanctuary laws. Certainly the Steinle case itself prompted little self-reflection from city elites who weathered the negative publicity and then doubled down on their commitment to protect illegal aliens who commit further crimes.
It was this renewed indulgence from unbowed politicians, judges, prosecutors and activists that opened the door to a cadre of Honduran drug dealers who embedded themselves in San Francisco over the next decade. The catrachos took to selling fentanyl like ducks to water and became the entry vector through which the synthetic opioid inflicted its terrible toll on those drawn to the city for drugs.
The scale of the damage they wrought has been enormous. Since 2015 overdose deaths rose from the low hundreds to, in 2023, an unprecedented 810 fatalities. In 2016, academics say, fentanyl began to compete with heroin as a leading cause of overdose deaths in San Francisco – and had surpassed it as a cause of death fully by 2018.
San Francisco leaders today remain in lockstep on the city’s sanctuary ordinances. Having given their full-throated support to their continued operation — and refused to countenance exceptions even for those illegal aliens who go on to commit other crimes — they have severely limited their ability to address the entirely predictable law enforcement challenges that arise as a result.
Newly-installed Mayor Daniel Lurie has pledged his commitment to the sanctuary rules which then provided comfort and succor to Kate Steinle’s killer and which today guarantee protection to any armed Central American drug trafficker who cares to pitch up and sell his wares.
Lurie conflates those in the country legally and illegal aliens by using the catch-all label “immigrants” – implying that one cannot oppose the latter without also opposing the former, and robbing ordinary San Franciscans of the language to describe what has been visited upon their communities – and by whom.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is similarly committed to offering illegal aliens protection from deportation. All of the many press releases her office publishes on drug dealer prosecutions scrupulously avoid any mention of the suspect’s nationality and immigration status – reflecting her determination to turn a blind eye to foreigners’ illegal status and not trust residents with the details.
The city’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to reaffirm their commitment to sanctuary protections for criminals in a January 2025 vote. And Sheriff Paul Miyamoto and City Attorney David Chiu are similarly strong supporters of shielding illegal alien criminals from the consequences of their actions.
But nowhere is the commitment to never holding criminal aliens to account stronger than at the city’s Hall of Justice where judge after judge, time after time, will release criminal foreigners no matter how many times they are arrested, how huge the quantity of fentanyl they have, or whether they are armed.
Honduran Joshua Lopez presumably couldn’t believe his luck when he was released by a San Francisco judge in 2023 twenty days after being found with more than a kilo of fentanyl and a machete. His release was all the more unlikely given he was on bail at the time he was detained and had fought the CHP officer, who had stopped Lopez’ car just one block from the city’s Hall of Justice, in an effort to get away.
Lopez had been arrested more than a dozen times previously so, to no one’s surprise, he went straight back to trafficking large quantities of narcotics. Scarcely two months later he was seen selling drugs in the Tenderloin and arrested by SFPD officers who discovered him in possession of another kilo of fentanyl.
Honduran Hanti Gamez sold fentanyl, in the guise of cocaine, which killed a San Francisco teacher and sickened his friends also in 2023. He had been arrested 14 times since 2015, mainly for drug offenses, with his penultimate arrest coming barely two weeks before he sold the drugs that caused the teacher’s death.
Honduran Kevin Martinez Cruz racked up a dozen arrests for peddling drugs in San Francisco since 2018. In 2024 he cut off his ankle monitor and continued dealing drugs after, months earlier, he cut off another ankle monitor and continued to deal drugs. Months before that he ran away from Sheriff’s officials who were trying to check another ankle monitor that he had not yet had the opportunity to cut off.
Honduran Angel Reyes was not dissuaded by his first drug dealing arrest in 2020 and spent a profitable three and a half years peddling fentanyl in San Francisco. The 23-year-old ‘dreamer’ was untroubled by any of his six subsequent arrests in the city, being quickly freed by local judges on each occasion.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for federal prosecutors appears to have been an arrest on Thanksgiving Day 2023 for drug dealing while on bail for two other drug dealing cases.
And Honduran, Jose Moises Hernandez-Mendoza, was given another lenient ‘time served’ sentence by a federal judge after being arrested four times since 2023 for dealing fentanyl in the Tenderloin.
An unprecedented disaster
By early 2023, however, the consequences of this hands-off approach to law enforcement had created intolerable street conditions for residents and caused a national spotlight to focus on rampant and highly visible criminality. City leaders faced a rising chorus of complaints from residents, on the one hand, while on the other being temperamentally unwilling and, in any event, incapable of mounting an effective response, having already tied both hands behind their own back with their refusal to cooperate with those who might send the Hondurans home
Federal prosecutions would be initiated against street-level drug dealers who were almost exclusively illegal aliens. Finding themselves facing years in federal custody, the perpetrators were incentivized to rapidly plead guilty, be given a ‘time served’ sentence and be sent for deportation – often in as little as a month from arrest.
Most federal judges were content to rubber stamp these plea deals. But a handful — aghast at the low sentences they were being asked to endorse and horrified at the catalog of leniency already shown to the defendants in state court — refused to cooperate and insisted on regular prosecutions.
By the end of 2024, and after sixteen months in operation, federal officials said approximately 130 defendants had been dealt with under the fast track program with the “vast majority” receiving time served sentences and “very few” having returned to the U.S. after deportation and been caught again.
One such returnee, Honduran Jose Flores, this month found himself back before the same federal judge who, in December 2023, gave him a ‘time served’ 16-day sentence after he was caught selling drugs in San Francisco. He was then sent for deportation.
An undeterred Flores simply crossed the border, again, and continued dealing drugs until highway patrol officers captured him in May 2025 as he was running cocaine and heroin into San Francisco from across the Bay Bridge.
In other cases deportation is frustrated directly by local officials’ antics. Last year a federal judge gave Jose Hernandez-Mendoza a ‘fast track’ sentence and ordered the Alameda County Sheriff to hand him to U.S. Marshals, who would then hand him to ICE.
Instead, in an echo of the underhandedness that led to Kate Steinle’s killer being released, the Alameda Sheriff honored an outstanding warrant in their county and kept him in custody until, shortly thereafter, those state charges were dismissed, and they were free to let him go. He went straight back to dealing fentanyl in the Tenderloin and was later rearrested.
Still others benefit from public defenders’ willingness to deploy frequently questionable legal claims to stave off their deportation: from asylum petitions, ‘human trafficking’ visa applications, becoming a ‘special immigrant juvenile’ or, if none of that works, vaguely suggesting that they might be tortured if sent back.
And many Honduran drug dealers, in common with other illegal aliens, have been in the country so long that they have had children born in the U.S. – children who, as the law currently stands, are regarded as U.S. citizens and may act as anchor babies for their parent’s subsequent return to the country after deportation.
“He was in the state court system being treated as if he was hardly doing anything wrong. They would put him on probation…and within days he would be back on the street committing another crime.”
U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney
San Francisco’s federal judges frequently express amazement at the leniency shown to the parade of foreign drug dealers by their colleagues at the city’s superior court.
“While he was arrested a lot by the San Francisco Police Department,” observed U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley as she sentenced a Honduran in March 2025, “he never got any significant jail time which, I think, is contributing to what we see – hopefully that will change somewhat.”
“It’s just amazing when you see the merry-go-round that’s occurring,” she added.
“He was in the state court system being treated as if he was hardly doing anything wrong,” said U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney as she sentenced in March a Honduran whose fentanyl killed a man. “They would put him on probation…and within days he would be back on the street committing another crime.”
“I think what concerns me is the fact that he was released in superior court on his own recognizance and then he continued to sell drugs and the drug he is selling is fentanyl,” said U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in April as he sentenced another Honduran who went back to dealing fentanyl after being freed at the city’s Hall of Justice.
“This suggests to me that maybe the judges aren’t doing the right thing — somebody’s not doing the right thing.”
“I think what concerns me is that fact that he was released in superior court on his own recognizance and then he continued to sell drugs and the drug he is selling is fentanyl. This suggests to me that maybe the judges aren’t doing the right thing – somebody’s not doing the right thing.”
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer
Merciless crackdowns on unchecked criminality are embedded in San Francisco’s DNA – since the Barbary Coast in the early 1900s and the Tong Wars of the 1920s the city’s history is strewn with examples of leaders belatedly realizing their indulgence had gone too far and moving decisively to curb lawbreaking.
In a better world Kate Steinle’s death at the hands of Garcia Zarate would have prompted another such epiphany and forced action to prevent illegal alien ne’er-do-wells making their home here.
Instead Honduran traffickers were permitted to gain a foothold, and the situation allowed to worsen, and then fester, until the lawlessness reached a state that even federal authorities have struggled to address.
Judge Moses hasn’t forgotten San Francisco’s role in Steinle’s death. Just four months ago, from Courtroom 1 in Del Rio federal courthouse, she overruled a junior federal judge in San Francisco, who she feared was poised to free a Honduran drug dealer also wanted in Texas – moving so swiftly that the local judge protested no final decision had yet been made.
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