Mayor Daniel Lurie won’t say the quiet part out loud in defense of sanctuary city law

San Francisco can’t stop fentanyl deaths without removing deadly dealers

On Jan. 23, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations San Francisco (ERO) arrested Juan Velasquez-Francisco, “an illegally present Guatemalan national convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor.”_________________________________________

On July 1, 2015, a vivacious 32-year-old woman named Kate Steinle was walking along the Embarcadero’s Pier 14 with her father when she was struck in the chest by a bullet. The shooter, an illegal immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had five previous convictions for reentry after deportation and seven prior felony convictions. In a jailhouse interview with ABC7 News, he confessed to the killing and said he came to San Francisco because it was a “sanctuary city” where he wouldn’t be turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Lopez-Sanchez was sent back to San Francisco after serving time at the federal prison in Victorville, Calif., to face a 20-year-old marijuana charge, where Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi ignored an ICE detainer requesting notification before Lopez-Sanchez’s release. Adding fuel to the flames, one month prior, Mirkarimi had issued a memo to deputies barring them from communicating with federal immigration agents. Lopez-Sanchez was freed in San Francisco, homeless and indigent, just four months before Steinle’s killing,

Then District 2 Supervisor Mark Farrell and I both authored columns about the Steinle case in the August 2015 issue of The Marina Times newspaper. My Reynolds Rap paid homage to Kate and her love of elephants, something we both had in common: She saw their beauty and majesty volunteering at elephant sanctuaries, and I saw the ugly side of captivity as members of my father’s family travelled with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. “I know why Kate loved elephants,” I wrote. “Because they’re kind, gentle, innocent souls who don’t deserve to be born into a world where their parents can’t save them from evil, just like Kate herself.”

At the July 21, 2015, Board of Supervisors meeting, Farrell introduced a public safety reforms package that both affirmed the Board of Supervisors’ support for the sanctuary city ordinance and urged the sheriff to immediately rescind his department-wide gag order barring any communication with federal immigration authorities. “Unfortunately, our sheriff chose to implement additional ideological policies for his department that fly in the face of not only our local laws but federal law as well, and it must come to an end,” Farrell wrote in his column. “Let me be clear: our sanctuary city policy, in place since 1989, does not and was never intended to serve as a shield for criminal behavior in our communities .… [I]f our public safety leaders are not appropriately handling the discretion proscribed by our federal and local laws, we need to take a hard look at other measures to ensure similar incidents never happen again in San Francisco.”

When Farrell asked the board to pass his reforms, a crowd of 250 immigrant rights activists turned their backs on him in a show of protest. His fellow supervisors did the same. In an embarrassing display of arrogance and ignorance, Supervisor Malia Cohen called Steinle’s death “senseless and tragic” but said that she and her colleagues disagreed on “the role — if any” that San Francisco’s existing sanctuary ordinance played in the event. Cohen told a cheering crowd, “We cannot allow one event to dictate 25 years of our city’s policies toward undocumented immigrants.” The board went on to unanimously pass an alternate nonbinding resolution by District 9 Supervisor David Campos that affirmed the existing policy of not notifying ICE when illegal immigrants are being released, supporting Mirkarimi’s position. Under the Campos resolution, Lopez-Sanchez still would have been freed before the shooting. In other words, nothing changed.

In November 2015, I wrote a columntitled, “Does the Board of Supervisors care more about protecting illegal immigrant felons than preventing another tragedy? Sanctuary city: Déjà vu yet again.” The title referred to events that occurred exactly six years prior to the Steinle hearing, when the board voted to overturn a policy ordered by then Mayor Gavin Newsom requiring police to contact ICE upon arresting juvenile illegal immigrants on felony charges. “Sanctuary city was never designed to protect people who commit crimes,” Newsom said at the time. Newsom’s policy stemmed from a series of disturbing incidents, including the revelation that San Francisco had flown minors to their home countries at taxpayer expense rather than turn them over to ICE, and had also sent a gang of young Honduran crack cocaine dealers to a group home in Southern California from which they simply walked away. However, Newsom’s policy was primarily in response to anger, especially in the immigrant community, over the June 2008 murders of Tony Bologna (age 49) and his sons, Michael and Matthew (ages 20 and 16, respectively), in the Excelsior District resulting from a random act of road rage. The murders were committed by Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant MS-13 gang member from El Salvador convicted of two violent crimes as a teenager. Ramos was also arrested in San Francisco a month prior to the killings on a weapons possession charge, but the case was dismissed by the district attorney’s office for “lack of evidence.”

Lurie has spoken a lot about the need to ‘get people help,’ but he hasn’t said the quiet part out loud: arresting (and if they’re here illegally, deporting) drug dealers.

Once again it was Campos who sponsored an alternate ordinance to shield criminal illegal immigrants, stating that referrals would be required only after juveniles were convicted of crimes instead of after their arrest. The majority of his colleagues agreed, and the changes took effect despite a Newsom veto. Even Angela Alioto, who authored the original Sanctuary City ordinance, said that after the Campos amendments it became “a magnet for felons across America to come to the safe shores of our city” and “made San Francisco a more violent and unsafe city.”

Tragic and infuriating incidents involving criminals here illegally continue to haunt San Francisco officials, including thousands of overdose deaths on city streets as a result of drug dealers slinging fentanyl, the majority here from Honduras. In June 2022, I penned a story titled, “The mansion that fentanyl built” about the feds arresting a family of Tenderloin drug dealers. One was building a lavish home in Honduras. According to federal documents, Emilson Cruz-Mayorquin, or “Playboy” as he is known on the streets, was the go-to person for fentanyl in the Tenderloin. During a call intercepted over his mother Leydis’s phone line, she speaks with a family member about the house Emilson is constructing in Honduras. “Life is a little stressed because Emilson has a lot of customers,” Leydis says. “He’s removing the ceramic from the house, he’s going to put in porcelain — how can I say no to him .… That house is not going to look like a house, it’s going to look like a mansion,” the relative responds. “My god, Emilson doesn’t stop spending, right?” Leydis asks rhetorically. “God permit … so, there’s a mansion and a half.” Exhibit photos display Playboy’s mansion in Honduras, replete with marbled bathroom walls and a porch held up by Roman-style pillars.

Sanctuary city folie à deux

“You would think the Steinle case would be a wake-up call for City Hall, but it appears Kate’s heartbreaking death was in vain,” I wrote in 2015, but clearly our leaders have learned nothing, including new mayor Daniel Lurie. In late January, Lurie and the mainstream media crowed about his “Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance” which would “allow the city to enter into contracts related to addiction, homelessness and mental health without going through a monthslong competitive bidding process.” This sounds like a typical ask from a former nonprofit head like Lurie, where he can give no bid/no audit contracts to nonprofits like HealthRight 360, which he supported through his nonprofit Tipping Point. The board’s budget and legislative analyst said the “loosened contracting rules” could apply to more than $1 billion in government spending.

Lurie’s proposal would also let him raise money from wealthy donors “to support the same areas covered by the loosened contracting rules.” As the reporter who broke the City Hall corruption stories leading to prison time for officials who used “behested payments” (payments made at the behest of a government official to a third party), I find this part shocking as well. In 2021, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors even passed a law that prohibits such payments. In a purely performative hissy fit, then Mayor London Breed — who used behested payments to great advantage — returned the legislation unsigned on Christmas Eve. Ordinance 220539 amended the rules further when voters approved Proposition E in 2022, prohibiting officers and designated employees from directly or indirectly soliciting behested payment from interested parties. Proposition E also requires the Board of Supervisors to win the approval of the Ethics Commission for any changes it makes to the law. Yet on Feb. 4, many of those same supervisors, and some newly elected ones, agreed to expand Lurie’s power to utilize behested payments in a 10–1 vote. Lame duck District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton dissented — ironic, considering Walton and his “friends with community benefits” have benefited from behested payments more than anyone else at City Hall. Two of those friends, Mohammed Nuru and Harlan Kelly, learned the hard way that there is no such thing as a free behested payment (see above reference to officials in prison). Now you can add the city’s new mayor to the list of officials owing favors: I imagine Lurie will hit up his fellow billionaire buddies, and I also imagine those buddies will call in their chips when they need something from the city.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Lurie took an impromptu walk down Sixth Street, “one of the most troubled corridors in the city,” hours before he introduced the legislation (though a citizen journalist said he witnessed Lurie getting out of a vehicle with security for the “photo opp” and then jumping back into the vehicle to be whisked to City Hall). While pushing his program, Lurie has spoken a lot about the need to “get people help” and “get people shelter beds,” but he hasn’t said the quiet part out loud: arresting (and if they’re here illegally, deporting) drug dealers. Complicating matters, Jackie Fielder — who replaced Hillary Ronen, who replaced David Campos as District 9 supervisor — made her first piece of legislation a reaffirmation of the sanctuary city “Campos edition” (you can’t make this stuff up). Just like Campos and Ronen before her, Fielder grandstanded about “protecting immigrant communities,” despite the fact it is most often immigrant communities that suffer due to the protection of illegal immigrant criminals.

Not to be left out, Lurie joined Fielder and other supervisors on the steps of City Hall to signal his support of the current sanctuary ordinance. “This city is your home,” Lurie shouted in his now-familiar stilted cadence. “And know that I and everyone here will continue working to make sure it remains a safe and welcoming home for all families, no matter where you come from.” That’s where Lurie missed a gargantuan opportunity to set himself apart by simply adding, “But we won’t tolerate drug dealers, pedophiles, rapists, or any other criminals here illegally, and we will cooperate with ICE to remove them.” In fact, he could have used a case from the previous week as an example.

On Jan. 23, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations San Francisco (ERO) arrested Juan Velasquez-Francisco, “an illegally present Guatemalan national convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor,” in Sacramento, Calif.

According to ERO, Velasquez first entered the United States on an unknown date at an unknown location. On May 25, 2021, he was convicted of misdemeanor driving under the influence. On Nov. 12, 2024, he was convicted of sex with a minor and lewd acts with a minor, both felony offenses. “ERO officers in the San Francisco area of operations are committed to enforcing our nation’s immigration laws against violent criminals, sex offenders and others who pose a threat to public safety,” said Orestes Cruz, ERO San Francisco acting field office director. “This arrest is just one example highlighting the work ICE ERO officers perform each day to make our communities safer.”

Note to Mayor Daniel Lurie: You represent the tone at the top. By not saying the quiet part out loud, you let all San Franciscans know that where illegal immigrants committing crimes are concerned, including those dealing deadly fentanyl, your tone is full of hot air and hypocrisy.