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Beverly Hills, California, United States
Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Monday, July 13, 2015

Sheriff in San Francisco Faults Federal Authorities After Killing

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.”

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