After Killing Tied to Deported Felon, San Francisco Mayor Mulls Policy Shift

By JENNIFER MEDINA and JULIA PRESTON JULY 8, 2015



Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who pleaded not guilty in the fatal shooting of Kathryn Steinle, was arraigned in San Francisco on Tuesday.CreditPool photo by Michael Macor

LOS ANGELES — With San Francisco’s immigration policies drawing criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike, Mayor Edward M. Lee said Wednesday that he would speak to federal officials about how the city could participate in a new Obama administration deportation program, after a Mexican felon who had been deported five times was charged with murdering a 32-year-old woman, Kathryn Steinle, as she walked on a tourist pier in the city last week.

The mayor’s comments, on KQED Radio, came after he braved a week of outrage over the city’s longstanding sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants, which have curtailed most cooperation between the local police and federal immigration agents.


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Mr. Lee “has asked his staff to begin researching how we could participate in the program while still upholding the laws and values of our sanctuary policy,” Christine Falvey, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said in a telephone interview. “He thinks we absolutely should look into this program if we can participate and still protect all of our residents.”

San Francisco’s decision to let the Mexican felon, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, out of jail without alerting the federal authorities has been castigated by Republicans like Donald J. Trump and questioned by Democrats, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and California’s two Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Jeb Bush, at a Republican campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday, said that sanctuary cities should be eliminated.


Ms. Feinstein wrote a letter to Mr. Lee urging him to cooperate with officials from the Department of Homeland Security and its Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arm, to participate in a new federal program that focuses on criminal convicts and asks the police to notify federal agents when those immigrants will be released.


“The tragic death of Ms. Steinle could have been avoided,” Ms. Feinstein said in a statement. “I strongly believe that an undocumented individual, convicted of multiple felonies and with a detainer request from I.C.E., should not have been released. We should focus on deporting convicted criminals, not setting them loose on our streets.”


“I agree,” Mr. Lee said in a radio interview on Wednesday, responding to Ms. Feinstein. He said he would speak with senior Homeland Security officials this week to explore how the city could participate in the new federal deportation program.


Also on Wednesday, officials said that the gun they say that Mr. Lopez-Sanchez used came from a federal Bureau of Land Management law enforcement agent. It was stolen from the ranger’s vehicle in June while he was in San Francisco on official business, a spokesman for the agency said. The theft was immediately reported to the San Francisco police.


The weapon, a .40-caliber handgun, was found in San Francisco Bay by police divers soon after Ms. Steinle was shot and killed while she was walking along Pier 14, a popular tourist attraction, with her father and a friend. Mr. Lopez-Sanchez, 56, pleaded not guilty in court on Tuesday and is being held on $5 million bail.


The police used the serial number on the gun to track it to the federal agent.


San Francisco is a so-called sanctuary city, where undocumented immigrants without criminal records are generally protected from federal deportation agents. But “the sanctuary city ordinance was never designed to harbor repeat serious offenders,” Mr. Lee said on KQED. “If there is a gap, let’s close that gap.”


Mr. Lee, who often points out that his parents were Chinese immigrants, has faced a week of outraged questions, including from many residents, over the city’s sanctuary policies. He placed some blame for the mishandling of Mr. Lopez-Sanchez on the county sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi, who released him on April 15 without notifying federal agents.


“I think a simple phone call would have done the trick,” Mr. Lee said. “I think the sheriff dropped the ball there.” He said more direct communication with federal agents might be needed. If San Francisco joined the Homeland Security program, it would be a reversal of the city’s longstanding reluctance to cooperate with the federal immigration authorities.


Of the undocumented immigrants living in the United States, roughly one quarter are in California, more than any other state in the country. Immigrants account for roughly 30 percent of the state population, and Latinos now outnumber whites as the state’s largest ethnic group.


California legislators have passed several laws designed to integrate undocumented immigrants living in the state, including a law that is meant to protect undocumented immigrants without a criminal history from deportations.


Gov. Jerry Brown, who initially vetoed the legislation and later signed an amended version, has so far not spoken out about the shooting. In a statement, his spokesman, Evan Westrup, said that “California law vests authority for cases of this kind within the sound discretion of local authority,” adding, “A tragedy such as this warrants a careful review of what happened, how the applicable rules were interpreted and what changes might be called for.”


On Tuesday, Ms. Boxer, who has announced her retirement, called for a review of the state’s detention policies in the wake of Ms. Steinle’s murder. “For decades, I have supported deporting violent criminals, and I have always believed that sanctuary should not be given to felons,” Ms. Boxer said. “I have reached out to Governor Brown to ask whether state law was followed in this case, and if so, whether the law needs to be strengthened to ensure that a tragedy like this never happens again.”


On Tuesday, Ms. Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, said that San Francisco officials had “made a mistake,” adding in an interview on CNN that she had “absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on.”

And earlier this week, Mr. Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, seized on the Lopez-Sanchez case as proof of his assertion that scores of immigrants coming from Mexico are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.”

While many public officials in the state have emphasized that they support deportation of criminals, there has been no call for a wholesale revamping of the state’s policies. Instead, the State Senate plans to vote on a resolution Thursday condemning Mr. Trump.


“We’re not going to allow the scapegoating or have the deplorable actions by one deranged individual stop our effort to include the millions of hard-working immigrants who call California home,” said Ricardo Lara, a state senator from Los Angeles and a former chairman of the Legislature’s Latino caucus. “These are two very different things, and we’re not going to let this deter years of progress we have made here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/us...ral-agent.html