By Carla Marinucci on July 22, 2015 3:00 AM

In a letter addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Pelosi and Lofgren address the case of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the undocumented Mexican immigrant charged with the shooting of the 32-year-old woman on San Francisco’s Pier 14 earlier this month.

The letter came the same day as the Senate Judiciary Committee took up the issue of criminal undocumented immigrants and how to best protect public safety and heard from the victim’s father, Jim Steinle of Pleasanton.

Pelosi and Lofgren, in their letter, noted that currently “state and federal criminal matters generally must be resolved before Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will accept custody of an inmate for deportation.”

In the case of Lopez-Sanchez, local officials say he was transferred by private transportation from Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Victorville to San Francisco at the request of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, acting on a 20-year old warrant for a marijuana offense. Lopez Sanchez, three weeks later, was released from county jail to the streets, despite five deportations and a string of felony convictions.

Though the ICE had a detainer on Lopez Sanchez and had asked to be notified of his release, San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy and local ordinances mandated that such ICE detainers not be honored. An S.F. Sheriff’s Department directive went even further — mandating that department employees not cooperate or communicate with with the immigration officials by providing information such as release dates.

The two Bay Area Democrats noted that “this policy generally makes sense, because justice demands that a person who commits a crime be held to answer for that offense. Moreover, a person who stands accused of a crime deserves the opportunity to appear in court to respond to the charges. To civilly deport all defendants and deny the ability of states and localities to pursue criminal prosecution would prevent such objectives.”

More from their letter:

“In some circumstances, rigid adherence to this policy may not actually serve the interests of justice. Rather, where the outstanding criminal warrant pertains to a particularly old charge not involving violence or serious damage to property – as was the case here – and the state or local prosecutor is unlikely to proceed with a prosecution, there is no purpose to be served in deferring deportation.”

“When (the Bureau of Prisons) is deciding whether to respect a federal immigration detainer or a non-federal criminal detainer, it would seem to be advantageous for the BOP, ICE, and the state or local jurisdiction to communicate regarding the competing interests at stake. Such a conversation would have to involve not only the law enforcement entity that is asserting the detainer as a result of the outstanding criminal warrant, but also the prosecuting entity that ultimately will decide whether or not to pursue prosecution.”

Pelosi and Lofgren argued that adopting this protocol would facilitate the removal of high-priority individuals, as well as “preserve limited time, money, and manpower that state or local law enforcement entities would otherwise expend needlessly” by retrieving individuals from federal custody who “simply will not be prosecuted.”

The full text of the letter is available here.

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election...iner-policies/