Mayor denounces sheriff — but can’t explain why

Lee tells supes that Mirkarimi’s policy endangers public safety — but he can’t offer a cogent alternative

By Tim Redmond

JULY 14, 2015 – Mayor Ed Lee came to the Board of Supervisors today to denounce Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi – but when I talked to him afterward, I was unable to understand what he thinks the sheriff did wrong.

He started his remarks by saying that Kate Steinle, the young woman shot at Pier 14,  was killed by a man “who should not have been released, who should not have been in our city, and should not have been in our country.”

That’s about the strongest statement he’s made to date about deporting people who have been convicted of crimes.

He spent a few minutes saying that, overall, the city’s Sanctuary Law has made San Francisco safer, because it’s encouraged immigrants to work with law enforcement to report crimes without fear of deportation.

But he then said that city officials should cooperate with federal immigration authorities in cases involving “violent or repeat offenders.”

The man charged in the killing of Steinle had no record of violence, but was indeed a repeat offender – he repeatedly entered the country after being deported.

He said the sheriff’s policy of not cooperating with ICE is “a threat to public safety.”

As he walked out of the chambers and back to his office, I asked the mayor what he thought the sheriff had done wrong. He told me that he thinks Mirkarimi should have called ICE and let the immigration agency know that Francisco Lopez-Sanchez was going to be released.

The city’s Sanctuary policy bars local officials from cooperating with ICE detainers. But the mayor said there’s a difference between detainers and information requests.

In other words: We can’t hold a person for deportation – but we can tell ICE that the person is about to be released, so ICE agents can arrest and deport him.

I don’t get the difference.

If the city’s policy – driven by some very, very bad behavior by the feds, including raids where parents were deported while young children were left behind, raids that caused thousands of San Franciscans to hide from any authorities in fear – is supposed to keep local law enforcement out of the immigration business, then how does calling ICE and inviting the agency to come arrest and deport someone consistent with that policy?

Is the sheriff – on his own, without any judicial order – supposed to decide which people in local custody are bad enough that they should be in effect turned over to ICE and which are harmless enough that the city can ignore ICE holds and let them go?

What standards should the sheriff use? Anyone with a felony gets deported? Anyone who has been arrested more than once gets deported?

There are, at this point, no such standards. The supervisors and the mayor have proposed none. Until the incident, everyone in town was pretty united on a basic policy: We don’t cooperate with the feds who want to deport people.

I asked the mayor to explain the difference between an ICE hold (which we can ignore) and an ICE request for information (which sometimes, on some basis that he couldn’t explain, the sheriff should accept), and all he could do was refer me to the Sanctuary law. Which is of no help on this point.

I remain baffled. I really, truly, can’t understand what the mayor thinks the sheriff should have done – except be prescient enough to guess that in this one case a person with no history of violence might find a gun and shoot someone and cause the mayor some political trouble.

Maybe I’m missing something. I wish I knew what it was.