“These people are victims of labor trafficking. They are told there are construction jobs in the U.S., then they are trapped and told if they don’t sell drugs the gangs will hurt their family members.”
— Former District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen on a proposal seeking the deportation of illegal immigrants arrested for selling deadly fentanyl
Regular Voice contributor Erica Sandberg recently penned a piece for City Journal in which she asked every member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a simple question: “Do you support the deportation of drug dealers who conduct their business in San Francisco and who are in the country illegally?” and a simple follow-up: “Will you urge cooperation with ICE to hold these dealers to account?”
The results should be shocking, but in San Francisco, they’re not. “Almost all of the city’s supervisors fell silent,” Sandberg wrote. “Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder, Danny Sauter, Shamann Walton, Myrna Melgar, Bilal Mahmood, and Chyanne Chen refused to respond to two requests for comment. Supervisor Stephen Sherrill provided a vague answer on X, saying fentanyl dealers “have no place” in San Francisco, without clarification. His statement was met with taunts on the social media platform, branding him “another coward” and asking, “Yes, or no? Simple question to answer in one word.” Supervisor Joel Engardio wrote that he supports the federal government’s authority to deport felons found guilty of violating the law but would not urge cooperation with the Trump administration, “because it cannot be trusted to apply the rule of law fairly.” That’s an interesting response from Engardio, who is facing the threat of a recall by his District 4 constituents, who feel he cannot be trusted after going against their wishes by supporting the closure of the Upper Great Highway to cars.
The only two affirmative responses, Sandberg states, came from board President and District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey. “If you’re convicted and in jail, I don’t have any interest in protecting you if you’re a rapist or a murderer. Drug dealers can be deadly. It would be better to get police and criminal justice response to enforce laws but if that’s not going to happen, I endorse deportation,” Mandelman told Sandberg by phone. Dorsey, whom Sandberg describes as “refreshingly unequivocal,” said, “fentanyl dealers who sell in San Francisco and are in the U.S. unlawfully should face deportation.”
In February 2023, Dorsey, a recovering drug addict himself, proposed legislation that would “create a new exception to San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies for adults who have been convicted of a fentanyl-dealing felony in the prior seven years, and then held to answer for another fentanyl-dealing felony, a violent felony, or a serious felony subsequently.” The change would allow local law enforcement officials to honor civil immigration detainers from federal authorities “in narrow circumstances” to reflect the gravity of a crime that currently claims more than nine times as many lives as homicide in San Francisco, and that has been solely responsible for nearly three-fourths of all drug overdose deaths citywide since 2020.
If Honduras identified 57 cases involving sex trafficking out of a total of 61 trafficking cases in all of 2024, it’s safe to say that dealers are here of their own free will.
A large majority of San Francisco residents agree with Dorsey. According to a May 2023 poll released by EMC Research, a survey of 500 likely voters discovered that 70 percent support revoking sanctuary city protections for undocumented immigrants who are found guilty of dealing fentanyl. Despite the strong feelings of their constituents, however, the other 10 supervisors did not support Dorsey’s proposal. Even Engardio, who ran on a “tough on crime” platform to oust far-left incumbent Gordon Mar, didn’t back Dorsey. Nor did then-District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, a former prosecutor known for taking a strong position in favor of recalling former district attorney Chesa Boudin (who saw fentanyl dealers as victims). Siding with her colleagues, Stefani robotically spoke of the importance of the sanctuary law, “which allows victims of serious crimes to feel safe to go to law enforcement.” (That progressive toe-the-line tone likely had to do with Stefani running for a state assembly seat, which she handily won.)
Despite undeniable evidence to the contrary, then-District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen and her husband, Francisco Ugarte (who managed the immigration unit for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office), continued spouting the myth of trafficked drug dealers. “These people are victims of labor trafficking. They are told there are construction jobs in the U.S., then they are trapped and told if they don’t sell drugs the gangs will hurt their family members. … To go after the immigration status of people on the lower end of the totem pole attacks the sacred Sanctuary Ordinance,” Ronen said regarding Dorsey’s proposal.
District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who was narrowly re-elected to her second term this past November (with just 53.42 percent of the vote) over moderate small business owner Matt Boschetto, noted the Sanctuary City Law “also protects workers, for example day laborers, who may work for two weeks for a boss who then says they aren’t going to get paid — and if they complain, the boss threatens to call the cops and allege that they are drug dealers.” Melgar, of course, cited no evidence to back up her claims.
San Francisco has perhaps the strongest Sanctuary City law in the country, defining the violent felonies ineligible for sanctuary protections as any of the more than two-dozen crimes identified in California Penal Code Section 667.5(c), which includes homicide, voluntary manslaughter, mayhem, rape, robbery, arson, attempted murder, kidnapping, carjacking, or threats to victims or witnesses. Other currently disqualifying felony convictions are for human trafficking, felony assault with a deadly weapon, or crimes involving the use of a firearm, assault weapon, or machine gun, as well as rape, exploding a destructive device with intent to injure, assault on a person with caustic chemicals or flammable substances, or shooting from a vehicle at a person outside the vehicle or with great bodily injury. Yet dealing fentanyl — which killed more people last year in San Francisco than all the ineligible crimes combined — is not on the list. In 2023, when Dorsey was seeking to amend the sanctuary city law to include fentanyl dealing, the city saw its deadliest year, with 810 overdose deaths, the vast majority from fentanyl. For comparison, there were 55 homicides.
Only one human trafficking case in S.F.
Since the progressive left chants the “fentanyl dealers are victims of human trafficking by coyotes in Honduras” mantra constantly, I decided to make a public records request with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. What I found should put an end to their claims once and for all: Since 2020, there has only been one human trafficking case charged in San Francisco, and the victim is a nanny, not a drug dealer. In December 2022, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged married couple Jose Aguila and Lorraine Lim with five felony counts related to human trafficking and three misdemeanor labor code violations stemming from an investigation into the working conditions of Aguila and Lim’s nanny, identified as “Nicel R.” The suspects brought Nicel R. from the Philippines to the United States, “forcing her to work seven days a week caring for their disabled child in addition to other forced labor in and outside of the home.” While Nicel R. was told it would only be for three months, the couple kept her here for two-and-a-half years, isolating her by “remaining in possession of her passport, restricting her from having friends or cell service, and controlling and monitoring her ability to leave the home/workplace.”
Honduran government trafficking numbers
According to the U.S. Department of State’s “2024 Trafficking in Persons Report: Honduras,” over the past five years, human traffickers exploited domestic and foreign victims in Honduras, and exploited victims from Honduras abroad.
Traffickers exploit Honduran women and children in sex trafficking within the country and in other countries such as Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Traffickers particularly target LGBTQI+ Hondurans, migrants and asylum-seekers, Indigenous and Afro-descendant Hondurans, IDPs [internally displaced people], persons with disabilities, children in child labor, children whose parents have migrated, and individuals living in areas controlled by organized criminal groups,” the report reads. “The Honduran government maintained its prosecution efforts. Amendments to Article 219 of the Honduran penal code, which took effect in November 2021, criminalized sex and labor trafficking and prescribed penalties of 10 to 15 years’ imprisonment. These penalties were sufficiently stringent and, with respect to sex trafficking, commensurate with those prescribed for other grave crimes, such as rape.
In 2024 the Honduran government investigated 61 trafficking suspects, including 57 for sex trafficking and four for “unspecified forms” of trafficking. Authorities initiated prosecutions of 48 suspects (42 for sex trafficking and six for labor trafficking) and continued prosecuting two suspected labor traffickers from cases initiated in previous years. So, if the Honduran government identified 57 cases involving sex trafficking out of a total of 61 cases in all of 2024, and San Francisco has charged just one human trafficking case since 2020 which had nothing to do with selling fentanyl, it’s safe to say that dealers are here of their own free will.
It’s time for the entire Board of Supervisors to recognize that fact and modify the sanctuary city law to include the deportation of those here illegally who deal fentanyl for profit and don’t care how many people they kill.