San Francisco is a city with a foreign policy. No joke. Its Board of Supervisors (county and city government are the same) has been issuing proclamations about world events since I can remember. Maybe the citizens of San Francisco would be better off if the Board focused on the city's needs rather than what is happening in Iraq. (Then again, maybe not.)
Anyway back in 1985, the Board wanted to stick a finger in the eye of President Ronald Reagan so it voted to establish the city as a sanctuary for people fleeing wars in El Salvador and Honduras. Four years later that policy morphed into a blanket sanctuary policy for any and all illegal aliens.
As a sovereign nation with its own foreign policy, SF decided recently that it would also institute its own means for deporting juvenile criminal illegal aliens.
For the last few years, your long-suffering law enforcement brethren in the City by the Bay have been catching illegal alien juvenile offenders and locking them up just like you would. Then the court convicted them and sentenced them to the juvenile system. There's nothing really out of the ordinary with that.
But here's where things take a decidedly weird SF turn. Once released, they should have been turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation. However, that's not what happened.
The sovereign nation of San Francisco has its own immigration policy. So, since at least 2005, the city has been running its own deportation system, escorting convicted juvenile illegal alien criminals back to their countries of origin on commercial airliners.
And that's not the real shocker. The city decided a while back that sending crack dealing illegal alien juvies back to their homes in coach class was way too cruel. So instead they dumped at least 10 of them into a group home in the Southern California community of Yucaipa. In other words, they exiled them from San Francisco into the United States.
Since said group home had no security whatsoever, most of these guys just walked out. Only one of them has been recaptured. Yucaipa is asking San Francisco officials: "What did we ever do to you?" And in not so polite terms. It's threatening to sue.
SF Mayor Gavin Newsome has since changed the city's policy on juvenile illegal alien criminals; once their time is served, they are now turned over to ICE. Of course, that's little consolation to the citizens of Yucaipa.
Nor is it consolation to the citizens of San Francisco who are also now beginning to question their government's foreign policy. Their outrage comes largely from the murder of much of the Bologna family, which officials say was committed by an illegal alien from El Salvador who is a reputed member of Mara Salvatrucha.
On June 22 of this year, Edwin Ramos, 21, allegedly decided to spray the Bologna's family car with AK rounds because it blocked his path or because he thought the driver was a rival gang member. Authorities say that the hail of bullets killed Tony Bologna 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16.
Here's the kicker: Police say the suspected killer was arrested and convicted twice of juvenile offenses in the sovereign nation of San Francisco. In one, Ramos and some homies beat a man senseless on a city bus and, in the other, he tried to rob a pregnant woman.
Following both convictions, Ramos wasn't turned over to the feds for a trip back to sunny Salvador because that violates SF immigration policy. Heck, he wasn't even sent to a group home in Yucaipa. He was just released after serving time in the system.
Back in March, he also spent three days in jail for suspicion of carrying a handgun. And somehow both the county and the feds dropped the ball. But the bottom line is that Ramos benefited greatly from SF's foreign policy. And if Ramos is convicted of murdering the Bologna's, then that foreign policy is directly responsible for him being in the country.
In a few months, San Francisco residents will be voting on whether to name a new waste treatment plant for President George W. Bush. Obviously some Haight-Ashbury flashback case or Yippie wannabe came up with this idea as a comment on the Bush administration's foreign policy and the Iraq War. But I would recommend that the right-thinking people of SF nominate another candidate for this dubious honor: their own Board of Supervisors. It's their foreign policy that really stinks and endangers the citizens' lives.
