Another day, another damning indictment of how California Democrat policies in support of illegal immigration are fueling the destruction of once-thriving major cities in the Golden State. A shocking in-depth investigative report by the San Francisco Chronicle reveals that violent Honduran migrants ruthlessly wield control over the open-air drug market in the decaying Cable Car City.
“Since the [coronavirus] pandemic, drug dealers who have migrated from Honduras, mostly from the Siria Valley about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa … have taken control of the open-air markets in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods [of the city],” the paper details. “They amount to hundreds of cogs in a global enterprise that’s supplied by Mexican cartels and enriched by an epidemic of addiction in America.”
San Francisco joins Los Angeles as another grandstanding California “sanctuary city” for illegal aliens. These locales are now faced with social scourges that have made them virtually uninhabitable for law-abiding citizens. As Liberty Nation documented July 7, Los Angeles officials are perplexed by a surge in homelessness in the city and surrounding suburbs that comes at the same time LA moves to officially codify its illegal-alien safe-harbor status into law.
“We are a sanctuary city,” a banner headline proclaims on the official San Francisco mayoral page. “Since 1989, San Francisco has proudly been a Sanctuary City,” the text proclaims. “We will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our immigrant communities and fight for the progress we’ve achieved in this City. We are a sanctuary city, now, tomorrow and forever.”
‘The Specter of Violence Is Constant’
While leftist city officials flash their bogus compassion, residents are best advised to keep their heads on a swivel. The “migrants” welcomed into San Francisco “now and forever” come bearing machetes.
“Bloody turf wars and gang initiation rituals aren’t defining features of San Francisco’s modern drug operation, partly because the Honduran dealers ‘all know each other,’ a city police officer said,” the Chronicle account continues. “[Yet] the specter of violence is constant. Almost all the Honduran dealers the Chronicle interviewed said that despite their dominance over the area, they or their families in Honduras could be killed for running afoul of the bosses. On the streets, desperate customers can be volatile, and robbers know they’re carrying cash. The Hondurans are known to defend their territory with knives and machetes.”
The “cultural enrichment” of illegal immigration is flourishing in the Bay Area, and it’s exceedingly difficult to conjure up sympathy for inhabitants of the famously ultra-progressive burg who have backed one outrageous gesture after another.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
This is the town in which a jury of local residents refused to deliver a murder conviction in the horrifying case of an illegal alien who in 2015 senselessly shot and killed Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old American citizen, as she was enjoying a walk on a waterfront pier with her father. City officials were openly defiant about their embrace of illegal aliens after the disturbing 2017 verdict came in. “Two former city supervisors … defended San Francisco’s sanctuary policy, which prohibits local cooperation with federal immigration authorities,” Associated Press reported at the time. “California [Democrat] state Sen. Scott Wiener says that public safety is improved when people who are in the country illegally can go to police without fear of deportation. David Campos, who now chairs the San Francisco Democratic Party, said the jury system worked.”
The violence perpetrated upon Kate Steinle eight years ago has metastasized and is running wild in San Francisco’s drug dens today.
San Francisco Hondos
While the Chronicle’s probe is exhaustive, it must be noted that the paper is late to the party in covering the mayhem unleashed by Honduran migrants.
Leighton Woodhouse at Real Clear Investigations exposed the hellish conditions in SF’s Tenderloin district in a riveting June 2022 report:
“Nancy Tung, a prosecutor who once handled drug enforcement in San Francisco, called it ‘ground zero for human misery.’ Kathy Looper, who has run a low-income, single resident occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin for more than 45 years, said, ‘It feels like we’re in Gotham,’ adding that she once considered putting a spotlight on her hotel roof and projecting a Batman signal into the sky …
“The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks – one centered on drugs and the other on theft – which thrive in that neighborhood because of the near-total absence of the enforcement of laws …
“‘Everyone knows what’s going on. The cops, mayor, and D.A.,’ said Tom Wolf, a recovering addict. ‘Everyone knows it’s organized and cartel-backed. They just don’t think it’s worth it to stop it, because nothing’s going to change anyway. They’ve surrendered.’”
Everyone knows who is working the drug trade, as well. “The drug pushers are easy to spot: Unlike the users, they look healthy and wear clean clothes. They’re almost universally young men, mostly Honduran (on the streets of San Francisco they’re called ‘Hondos’),” Woodhouse writes. “You see them standing on street corners on every block in the Tenderloin selling pills out of prescription drug bottles and white and colored powders out of plastic sandwich bags – fentanyl, meth, heroin, cocaine.”
(Photo By Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Just as Los Angeles officials deliberately refuse to put two and two together on ever-growing government support of illegal aliens and the rise of homelessness, so too have San Francisco governing entities intentionally buried their heads in the sand, clinging to a narrative of suffering migrants that cruelly ignores the pain caused to legal residents.
“During his tenure [as San Francisco District Attorney], Chesa Boudin resisted calls to prosecute these dealers, instead referring to them as victims of human trafficking,” Woodhouse relates.
Boudin was recalled and removed from office in June 2022 due to his complete unwillingness to prosecute serious crime in San Francisco. He was replaced by Brooke Jenkins, who openly calls herself a “progressive prosecutor.” And so the crisis continues to fester.
Woodhouse unmasked Boudin’s phony description of cartel business practices. What San Francisco leftists call the “trafficking” of “victims” is in fact the successful deployment of young, male soldiers on American soil:
“The dealers are usually smuggled into the United States by the cartel. When they arrive in San Francisco or another American city, they owe the cartel for getting them there – typically $10,000 to $15,000, which they can earn in a couple of weeks by selling the cartel’s drugs, both law enforcement and recovered addicts say. Once they repay the cartel, they’re free to do whatever they want. Usually, they stick with drug dealing, because no other job can make them that much money with so little risk. Dealers in the Tenderloin typically make about $1,000 a day for an eight- to 12-hour shift.”
California’s two largest cities are rapidly approaching their death throes due to deliberately obtuse pro-illegal immigration policies that callously place law-abiding local residents in mortal harm on a daily basis. Given the cherished progressive shibboleth at issue here, there is no reason to expect a change of course any time soon, no matter how high the body count may get.
