San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/immigration/page/3/)
Ten years after it was launched, Healthy San Francisco today predominantly serves Spanish speakers and people living in the city’s southeast neighborhoods. Because some clients may be here illegally, city officials have vowed to shield them if the Trump administration launches a deportation campaign.
This Charter amendment would allow non-citizen parents, legal guardians and caregivers of children 18 years old or younger who reside in San Francisco to vote for school board candidates. These new voters, who would register with the city’s Department of Elections, would need to be at least 18 years old and not be otherwise disqualified from voting under the California Constitution or state statute.
Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi is facing two challengers in his bid for re-election: Vicki Hennessy, who spent three decades in the department and served as interim sheriff in 2012 (after Mayor Ed Lee suspended Mirkarimi over a domestic-violence case involving the new sheriff and his wife) and John Robinson, a retired sheriff’s commander.
Some who flee captive labor conditions end up with low-wage jobs, insecure housing
People trafficked into the country receive temporary government and nonprofit social service benefits after rescue or flight from captivity: shelter, health care, counseling, employment and legal help. But once these benefits term out, counter-trafficking specialists worry that victims, who generally have little work experience and weak social and family networks, could fall back into labor conditions as exploitative as the ones they fled. As a victim of international labor trafficking, Lili Samad received government help to stay in the U.S. But she is among hundreds of trafficking survivors each year who end up, months after getting help trying to build a new life, living in marginal housing and working in low-wage jobs.
In the heart of East Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park is an incongruous reminder of California’s Mexican past: 6 acres of open space in a sea of single-family homes. What was once a massive ranchero now features a Victorian house surrounded by carefully tended vegetable gardens. Ben Glickstein is director of outreach here. He says back in 1820, Antonio Peralta had big agricultural dreams for this stretch of land that slopes down to Peralta Creek. “And we’re still using this for agriculture, for food, here in the middle of this pretty urban neighborhood.”
Detainees file into San Francisco immigration court linked together like a chain gang, bound at their wrists, waists and ankles. A metal chain or seatbelt-style restraint is wrapped around the detainees’ waists and connected to their wrists with a link to the detainee in front of them. The detainees often must sit four to a bench and remain bound to each other throughout the court proceedings. While sitting bound, they are limited in movements, and the restraints prevent simple tasks, such as taking notes during the proceeding.
Special victims unit to take a new victim-centered approach to human rights violations
The little-noticed use of San Francisco’s human trafficking task force to arrest street prostitutes over the summer underscores a sharp nationwide debate on how local law enforcement can help rescue victims of economic and sexual slavery. Until October, the city’s anti-trafficking team operated out of the San Francisco Police Department’s vice crimes unit. With the help of a federal-state grant, the team racked up more than 15 investigations of suspected traffickers. But in the spring it altered its tactics, making large-scale arrests of dozens of prostitutes in the Polk Gulch neighborhood, in response to complaints from neighbors.
The reorganization of the San Francisco Police Department’s Special Victims Unit has become an issue in the November vote for district attorney — at least for one contender in the race: Sharmin Bock, an Alameda County prosecutor. But in doing so, she clashed with police officials who said they need to rely more on federal investigators’ expertise. She said she has placed most of her emphasis on sex tafficking, but has little experience with labor trafficking.
The need to focus investigations on cases of suspected human trafficking was one of the key reasons for the reorganization of the San Francisco Police Department’s Special Victims Unit starting this week, the captain in charge of the new office said. The move places three full-time human trafficking investigators, including the police department’s acknowledged expert, in the same office space as more than 40 colleagues working in disparate areas such as sex crimes, domestic violence and financial crimes. Until now, no investigator worked full time on trafficking cases. The change will accompany increased coordination with federal law enforcement officials this week.
UPDATE 5/2/11: Sherriff Michael Hennessey wrote an op-ed piece in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle explaining his position on Secure Communities.
More than two decades ago, San Francisco took a stand against what it saw as an attack on undocumented immigrants. It imposed a “sanctuary city” policy, shielding people without papers who had been arrested on minor crimes and without criminal histories from federal immigration officials. Last June, however, the federal government introduced a database that began to vacuum up identifications of everyone arrested, looking for immigration violations. But now city officials are planning to again shield some immigrants in the San Francisco jail from possible deportation by refusing to hand them over. Sheriff Michael Hennesey says he believes this is permissible under federal law.
