San Francisco can help ICE deport criminals — and still be a sanctuary city
Undocumented drug dealers don’t deserve the same protections as law-abiding immigrants — and they certainly shouldn’t get sweetheart plea deals.
By Leighton Woodhose
Published Mar. 03, 2025 • 6:00am
The Trump administration has long blamed sanctuary cities as one of the main impediments to its mass deportation regime. To an extent, President Trump and his lieutenants are right. Policies like San Francisco’s Sanctuary Ordinance do hinder the president’s anti-immigrant agenda — if we’re talking about the deportation of law-abiding undocumented immigrants or those arrested for mundane misdemeanors like DUIs.
However, the administration is dead wrong to blame sanctuary policies for protecting the undocumented drug dealers responsible for the epidemic of fentanyl overdoses in the city. In fact, San Francisco’s sanctuary policies present no legal obstacle to deporting such criminals. Indeed, they help law enforcement investigate and prosecute them. There’s no need to revise the city’s sanctuary law to kick these dealers out of the country.
We just need to enforce the law.
Sanctuary laws help keep not just the foreign-born but all of us safe. It’s much more difficult to arrest criminals in the absence of sanctuary protections, because undocumented witnesses are afraid to testify against them. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement is serious about targeting hardened criminals within the undocumented population, as it has claimed, it’s going to need the help of local law enforcement officers, who, in turn, will need the cooperation of crime victims. The victims of gangs like MS-13 often live within immigrant communities. Nobody in those communities is going to talk to local cops who they suspect are working with ICE.
https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2025/03/03/san-francisco-can-help-ice-deport-criminals-and-still-be-a-sanctuary-city/
