New York Times
By Jennifer Medina
July 10, 2015
The
sheriff of San Francisco, Ross Mirkarimi, is a political veteran who
was once a rising star in the city’s most liberal circles, a critic of
many tough-on-crime policies
who was admired by many of the city’s immigrant-rights activists.
But
when the city began creating a policy to change the way local law
enforcement worked with immigrants, the sheriff largely stood on the
sidelines, as many of his onetime
supporters were reluctant to be perceived as working closely with him.
That
was a year after Mr. Mirkarimi had survived a potentially career-ending
episode when, after pleading guilty in a domestic violence case in
2012, there was an effort
by Mayor Edwin M. Lee to remove him from office. But the mayor’s move
was blocked by four of the city’s 11 supervisors; the mayor and the
sheriff have not been on speaking terms since.
This
week, Sheriff Mirkarimi was once again in the national spotlight over
his office’s release in April of a Mexican felon who is accused of
shooting a woman to death
on the tourist-friendly Embarcadero pier here on July 1. The suspect,
Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had been deported five times and spent 17
years in American jails when he was released by the San Francisco
sheriff’s office. Federal immigration officials
had asked to be notified of his release.
On
Friday Sheriff Mirkarimi, who has been the target of the most damning
criticism over the episode, stood in front of large pack of television
cameras and laid the blame
for the release of Mr. Lopez-Sanchez on federal officials, saying that
his office had done nothing wrong and had followed all legal procedures.
“What
we’re seeing is a lot of finger-pointing and distortion,” Sheriff
Mirkarimi said. Under an ordinance that the city passed in 2013 — which
received unanimous approval
from the Board of Supervisors and was quickly signed into law by Mr.
Lee — local law enforcement officials are not allowed to keep
undocumented immigrants in custody simply for being in the country
illegally. He cited that law as the reason Mr. Lopez-Sanchez
was released. For Sheriff Mirkarimi, the limelight could have hardly
fallen on a man with fewer political allies.
Earlier
this year, there were news reports that the sheriff’s deputies had
forced prisoners in jail to fight one another, which prompted some of
his staunchest supporters
to say they had lost faith in him. He is facing a tough battle for
re-election this fall, and law enforcement unions back his challenger.
The sheriff said on Friday that the blame directed at him was simply politics.
“The
mayor is throwing his own law under the bus,” Sheriff Mirkarimi said.
“If, in fact, he is looking for some loophole in the law, it really
defeats the whole purpose
of the law in the first place.”
When
immigrant rights advocates lobbied for the city’s ordinance, called Due
Process for All, in 2013, to stop local officials from cooperating with
federal immigration
agents, Mr. Lee pressed for leeway for law enforcement and eventually
reached a compromise with the supervisors. But Sheriff Mirkarimi, who
had long opposed working with federal immigration officials, was mostly
left out of negotiations because many groups
were reluctant to be associated with him, said Bill Hing, a law
professor at the University of San Francisco and the founder of the
Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
“It’s
fine that he’s carrying the banner now, but it’s not as if he created
the law. He was basically shunted aside,” Professor Hing said. “We have a
lot of politicians
who should be defending this policy.”
Lisette
Adams, the head of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Managers and Supervisors
Association, a union, said that many people within the department
objected to a ban on
cooperating with federal authorities, arguing that they had the legal
right and moral obligation to use their judgment.
“He
wanted to tie our hands from even making a phone call — he didn’t want
to leave us with any discretion,” Ms. Adams said of the sheriff. “We
never heard why what we
were doing wasn’t enough.”John Avalos, a member of the Board of
Supervisors and a longtime supporter of the sheriff, said the sheriff
had “always challenged the established order and questioned the way law
enforcement operates and pressed for more community
policing.”
Sheriff
Mirkarimi said Friday that he had met with top officials from the
Department of Homeland Security earlier this year and had made it clear
that his department would
not cooperate with any requests from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. That Mr. Lopez-Sanchez had been deported previously while a
case against him in San Francisco remained active showed that the
immigration agency had “detoured” from normal procedure,
the sheriff said.
Asked
what he would have done differently, the sheriff answered with the
pugnacious demeanor he is known for, saying that he would tell the
federal authorities, “Do your
job.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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