News

By Stephanie Pagones

July 10, 2023 | 4:36pm

Honduran migrants have taken over San Francisco’s drug market with the aid and blessing of Mexican cartels, according to a new report.

The Hondurans work on the front lines distributing to users, capitalizing on the lax immigration and crime policies of the California sanctuary city, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

They operate brazen open-air markets in the in city’s notoriously blighted Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods, where they have squeezed competition out through their highly-coordinated organization and sheer numbers, according to the report.

The migrants often commute to their street-dealing posts via public transportation and “conduct business like they’re going to a job,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told the outlet. 

San Francisco is seen as a target for “Hondos,” a slang term for Honduran drug dealers, because of its lax policies stemming from bail reform and its “sanctuary city” designation, according to the report. 

“[I]n San Francisco, it’s like you’re here in Honduras,” an anonymous dealer told the  Chronicle. “The law, because they don’t deport, that’s the problem … Many look for San Francisco because it’s a sanctuary city. You go to jail and you come out.”

Homeless people consume illegal drugs in an encampment along Willow St. in the Tenderloin district of downtown on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022 in San Francisco, California.Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

People seen in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, California, United States on June 6, 2023. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Homeless tents near the Tenderloin District in San Francisco.Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

San Francisco’s “City and County of Refuge” Ordinance, which makes the area a sanctuary city, largely prohibits city employees from assisting US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in their investigations or efforts, and bars ICE from being able to step in after police have arrested a migrant. 

The investigation found most of the migrants come from the same area, Siria Valley, in Honduras — where people typically earn $8 a day — and recruit others from their families or friendship circles to join them, because they feel they can trust them better.

They pay people smugglers — known as coyotes — to initially get them into the US then live in packed apartments and houses in the neighboring city of Oakland and traveling into San Francisco to do their dealing.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer examines paperwork belonging to Honduran migrants on Sunday, May 21, 2023 in La Joya, Texas.James Keivom

A new controversial billboard that warns against fentanyl is posted near Union Square on April 04, 2022 in San Francisco, California.Getty Images

A local resident snapped a photo showing an apparent early-morning drug sale in San Fransisco.

Mules working for the Mexican Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa Cartels are providing them with the narcotics, mostly laced with highly lethal fentanyl, which they then sell on the streets of Tenderloin and South of Market.

Dealers told the newspaper they would usually make around between $300 and $700 a day, although cuts from that have to go to street associates from their crew and back up the chain to the distributors.

Those working the streets and taking delivery of drug shipments say they do not know the people higher up the chain from the cartels, offering a level of protection to them and making the police’s job to trace back the drugs much harder.

Over 200 migrants from Honduras have been nabbed for selling drugs in San Francisco since the beginning of last year, the Chronicle found. 

The community reportedly began to take over the drug market during the COVID shutdown, but would not have made such strides if not for the support Mexican cartels, Wade Shannon, former special agent-in-charge of the San Francisco field office of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, told the outlet. 

“If [the cartels] decide to ever cut [the Hondurans] off, that’s the end of the game,” he reportedly said. “But I think they provide a value to the cartels there; they’re moving a lot of their product.”

Only six percent of those charged for dealing drugs between 2018 and 2022 have been convicted. The remainder are still being processed, or ended in plea deals with lesser charges, dismissals or diversion programs, the Chronicle found. 

On average, the outlet found, jail sentences for drug dealing lasted 168 days. 

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Mexico flies migrants south from the US border and buses newcomers away from the border with Guatemala to ease pressure on its border towns.

In the week since Washington lifted pandemic-era asylum-seeking restrictions on its border, US authorities are reporting a dramatic drop in illegal border-crossing attempts. In Mexico, authorities generally try to keep migrants south of this border. This strategy could temporarily reduce border crossings, but experts say it is not sustainable.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that in the week since the policy change, Border Patrol has experienced an average of 4,000 encounters per day with people transiting between ports of entry. That was a dramatic drop from the 10,000+ daily moving averages immediately prior.

With so many migrants crossing the border in the days before the U.S. policy change and Mexico’s efforts to relocate others inland, shelters in northern border towns are currently underutilized.

In southern Mexico, however, migrant shelters are full and the government is sending hundreds of migrants on buses more than 200 miles north to ease the pressure in Tapachula, near Guatemala. The government has also said it deployed hundreds of additional National Guard troops to the south last week.

On Friday night, Mexico’s immigration service offered migrants camped in central Mexico City — most of them Haitians — to fly them to Huixtla, a town near Tapachula, for accommodation and expedited document processing , said Alma Rubí Pérez, an immigration official in the country’s capital.

Segismundo Doguín, Mexico’s top immigration official in the border state of Tamaulipas across from Texas, said last week the government will fly as many migrants as needed out of the border towns of Reynosa and Matamoros.

The transfers were “cross movements to other parts of the country” where there weren’t as many migrants, Doguín said. He called them “voluntary humanitarian transfers”.

The Associated Press confirmed that over the past week, Mexican flights from Matamoros, Reynosa and Piedras Negras were carrying migrants inland. A Mexican federal official, who was not authorized to speak publicly but agreed to discuss the matter if not quoted by name, said about 300 migrants were being brought into the south every day.

Among them were at least some of the 1,100 migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba the US had sent back to Mexico in the week since the policy change.

“So the northern portion of the migrant route is somewhat depleted, but the southern and central portions remain extremely crowded and are constantly filling up,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight and close observer of the border at WOLA. a Washington-based human rights organization. “Obviously, that’s a balance that can’t last long.”

Mexico has shifted migrants south in the past when there were concerns about the capacity of northern border cities, but this time there are additional factors.

While the country’s shelters for migrants in the south are full, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute has closed its smaller detention centers for migrants across the country and conducted a review of its large ones, after 40 migrants died in a fire at a small detention center in the border city of Ciudad Juarez in March.

The federal official said Mexico’s largest immigrant detention centers are mostly empty. Two other federal officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest detention center, was empty.

Tonatiuh Guillén, former head of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, said Mexico’s actions are contradictory: on the one hand, it has told the United States it will curb migrants in the south, but on the other it has detained fewer people.

One morning this week, several hundred migrants waited on the outskirts of the southern city of Tapachula for government buses that would take them to Tuxtla Gutierrez, some 230 miles north.

Guillén said the document Mexico is now issuing to some migrants in Tuxtla Gutierrez — an expulsion order that gives migrants days or a few weeks to leave the country — leaves them with no other options, making it harder for them to seek international protection to apply.

Edwin Flores from Guatemala had been trying to get to the US on his own, but when he heard about the government buses from Tapachula he decided to give it a try.

“They didn’t tell us exactly what authorization they’re going to give us, just that we have to continue the paperwork there in Tuxtla Gutierrez,” Flores said. Other migrants said they arrived there but did not receive any document.

“We’ve heard on the news about all the legislative changes they’ve made and the massive deportations from the United States,” Flores said. Nothing has changed in his plans, “because the goal is to arrive and see for yourself what happens.”

He said he wanted to make an appointment with US authorities to file his asylum application. He said he was a private security guard in Guatemala and that gangs had tried to recruit him as their eyes on the streets.

On Wednesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Mexico said it was concerned about pressure on migrant shelters in southern Mexico and Mexico City. “In addition to those arriving from the south, some shelters have already taken in Venezuelans deported from the United States,” the agency said on Twitter.

A Venezuelan, who gave only his first name Pedro to avoid consequences, said this week he entered the US illegally just before the policy change last week but was brought back to Mexico in Piedras Negras.

“They put us on a bus, gave us a snack and took us to the airport,” said the 43-year-old, who previously obtained legal residency in Mexico. He was speaking from a migrant home called “The 72” in Tenosique near the Guatemalan border. “They left us in an industrial area of ​​Villahermosa. There they let us go and I came here defeated.”

With all the movement, migrants are an easy target. Gangs have kidnapped them from the streets of border towns and entire busloads of north-central Mexico.

This week, a busload of migrants disappeared near the border of San Luis Potosi and Nuevo Leon states. The migrants said a drug cartel abducted them when their bus stopped at a gas station. They had traveled from the southern state of Chiapas.

Bus company officials first reported the hijacking on Tuesday, telling local media that they had received demands for $1,500 a piece to free the migrants.

In the days following her kidnapping, 49 people were found – including Hondurans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Salvadorans and Brazilians – but authorities weren’t exactly sure how many of them had originally been on the bus.

“In whose hands are the people who migrate?” asked Alejandra Conde, who works at The 72 migrant home in Tenosique, one of the largest in southeastern Mexico. It was “like a Machiavellian strategy between authorities and organized crime”.

___

Clemente reported from Tapachula, Mexico. Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman of Mexico City contributed to this report.

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Rich Lowry

Opinion

From Rich Lowry

March 6, 2023 | 8:29 p.m

“By the age of ten I became a diligent little hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”

This is what David Copperfield tells in Charles Dickens’ novel of the same name.

Of course, Dickens was a crusader against child exploitation. However, his fiction’s depictions of the heartless treatment of children are defused by the funny and memorable depictions of the wrongdoers; the upward trend in the lives of the likes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist; and the knowledge that Dickens railed against is a thing of the past in the advanced world.

It takes a heart of stone not to smile at the name of David’s cruel stepfather Edward Murdstone (Mr. Murdstone to you) or the wine bottling factory where David is unfortunate to work, Murdstone and Grinby.

Orphan Oliver Twist had a tough time in a workhouse in the town of Mudfog. But at least Oliver avoids the dangerous fate of being apprenticed to the chimney sweep Mr. Gamfield, and eventually an unexpected inheritance and happy adoption awaits him.

All of this is relevant today because, as a major New York Times report pointed out, we have Dickensian border politics.

The Times describes how so-called unaccompanied minors end up “in some of the toughest jobs in the country.” The Times found “12-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Kids sawing planks of wood on night shifts in South Dakota.”

The Times reported that unaccompanied migrant children were found at forced labour.REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Needless to say, J.Crew and Walmart aren’t as charming as Murdstone and Grinby, and favorable twists are unlikely to be written in the stories of many children trapped in this maw of child labor. Most importantly, this has not happened in any other country more than 150 years ago.

The upshot of the Times article is that we’ve chosen to import a social issue—as if we didn’t have enough already.

The Times reports that child labor has “exploded” since 2021, which of course coincides with the advent of President Joe Biden’s lax border policies. A quarter million children have entered the United States in the past two years.

For no good reason, we have made it difficult for ourselves to quickly send home unaccompanied minors from non-contiguous countries, and so we have enabled a market for child smuggling and child labour.

As the Times puts it, “These are not children who snuck into the country undetected.” Officials interviewed by the newspaper estimate that two-thirds of all unaccompanied minors end up working full-time.

It’s bad for children, corrupt for the corporations that exploit them, and unhealthy for our society in general.

The Department of Health and Welfare is responsible for housing the minors upon arrival and for supervising them upon their release. It’s not doing a good job, but the king’s remedy would be better enforcement on the border and inland. In this way, children would not be sent across the border alone in the first place, on an arduous journey with perhaps a dangerous factory job at the destination. But nobody in charge ever seems to think about it.

There is still a lot to say about all of this.

NYT also reported that child labor has exploded since 2021.Go to Nakamura for NY Post

First, it should be remembered that migrants are meant to be asylum seekers fleeing persecution in their home countries; but almost every time the press reports extensively on the stories of individual migrants, they turn out to be economic migrants.

Second, it is hard to believe that the availability of cheap, easily exploited, illegal child labor would not put downward pressure on the wages of the low-skilled.

Third, not to sound like a child welfare nativist, but there are already many children in the United States who desperately need the attention of social workers.

Despite the Times story, the frontier madness will continue, and we can be sure it will not produce great literature.

Twitter: @RichLowry

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