SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco board of supervisors voted Tuesday to overturn a city policy that has been at the center of a national debate over offering illegal immigrants sanctuary.
The policy, ordered by Mayor Gavin Newsom last summer, requires the police to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement whenever they arrest a juvenile on felony charges who they suspect is in the United States illegally. Since the policy took effect last summer, more than 100 undocumented minors have been turned over to federal immigration authorities.
Mr. Newsom has said the ordinance is necessary to prevent young criminals from using the city’s so-called sanctuary policy, which prevents the use of city money for immigration enforcement.
“Sanctuary city was never designed to protect people who commit crimes,” said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom.
But under the changes approved Tuesday, referrals would be required only after juveniles were convicted of crimes, instead of after their arrest. Immigration advocates say that referrals upon arrest have resulted in the deportation of innocent youths, the breakup of families and a fear among immigrants of contacting the police when they are the victims of crime.
“We recognize that there’s a need to do some reporting” of illegal juveniles, said David Campos, the supervisor who sponsored the new ordinance. “But we’re trying to strike a balance.”
Tuesday’s meeting was filled to capacity, with hundreds of supporters of Mr. Campos’s bill filling the board’s chambers and two overflow rooms. Simultaneous translation of supervisors’ comments were offered in Mandarin and Spanish, and when the bill was passed, by 8 to 2 with one absentee, cheers erupted in the chambers, with chants of “Yes We Can” in English and Spanish echoing through the ornate City Hall.
Supporters continued chanting as they filed out past a bust of Harvey Milk, the trailblazing San Francisco supervisor and gay rights advocate whose name was invoked by supporters of Mr. Campos’s bill.
The vote was a sharp rebuke to Mr. Newsom, a Democrat who is running for governor and who has promised to veto it, though supporters seem to have enough votes to overturn that.
San Francisco adopted its sanctuary policy in 1989, and has long refused to refer minors in police custody to the federal authorities, although adults accused of felonies have always been referred. Some of these minors were later flown to their home countries at taxpayer expense rather than being turned over to immigration authorities. Mr. Newsom learned of those flights last May and ordered them stopped.
Mr. Newsom’s policy was also a response to a series of embarrassing revelations in The San Francisco Chronicle, including that the city, rather than turning a group of young Honduran crack dealers over to ICE, sent them to a group home in Southern California, from which they walked away.
The city was also shocked by a June 2008 triple murder, which prosecutors say was committed by Edwin Ramos, a suspected gang member and an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had been picked up as a juvenile by the San Francisco police but not referred to immigration authorities.
The fate of the sanctuary policy may well be decided in court.
An August memorandum from the office of the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, to Mr. Newsom said that while federal and state law concerning sanctuary cities was “not settled,” the ordinance that passed Tuesday could also “adversely affect” the city’s position in several pending cases concerning its sanctuary policy, including a criminal investigation by the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco.
Mr. Ballard, Mr. Newsom’s spokesman, echoed this, saying the supervisors’ vote, which will be formalized at a final reading of the bill next week, could invite a federal legal challenge to the entire sanctuary city policy.
“The supervisors did a foolish thing today by passing this bill that moves one step closer to imperiling the entire sanctuary city ordinance,” Mr. Ballard said.
But Mr. Campos, the supervisor and a naturalized citizen who emigrated — illegally — from his native Guatemala when he was 14, said the vote to change Mr. Newsom’s policy was necessary to maintain the city’s reputation as a safe haven for illegal residents.
“We went from being one of the most enlightened cities,” Mr. Campos said, “to be a place many steps backward to where the rest of the country is.”_ http://tiny.cc/ggNGn
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