By Casey Tolan, Bay Area News Group
During his run for governor, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he’s proud to represent a “sanctuary state,” sparred publicly with Attorney General Jeff Sessions over immigration, and vowed he’d go to jail to protect undocumented immigrants.
But a fight over sanctuary policy a decade ago when Newsom was mayor of San Francisco suggests that he wasn’t always as strident a defender of immigrant rights.
In July 2008, Newsom imposed a city policy that reported undocumented youth arrested for felonies to federal immigration authorities. That decision — made the week after a father and his two sons were killed by an undocumented immigrant — meant that some kids were put at risk of deportation even if charges against them were later dropped.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to overturn Newsom’s policy in 2009, mandating that minors could only be referred to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement if they were convicted of a felony. But Newsom’s administration simply ignored the board, continuing to turn juvenile arrestees over to ICE for the rest of his term.
Meanwhile, according to emails obtained by the Bay Area News Group, Newsom’s administration also conducted a review of people in the city’s probation system and referred more than 350 suspected undocumented immigrants to ICE.
Now, Newsom is a vocal supporter of California’s “sanctuary state” law — even though it goes beyond the local ordinance he refused to implement in San Francisco. The state law, SB54, bans law enforcement from reporting undocumented adults and youth to ICE, except for individuals convicted of specific felonies or serious misdemeanors.
San Francisco immigrant advocates say Newsom’s record should call into question his commitment to defending California’s sanctuary policies.
“Don’t try to rewrite history and portray yourself as a champion of immigrants when you yourself were prominently involved with a policy that led to the separation of families,” said former Supervisor David Campos, who led the fight against Newsom on the issue.
Newsom’s campaign did not make him available for an interview, but spokesman Nathan Click defended his candidate’s record.
“As mayor, Gavin protected and promoted San Francisco’s sanctuary policy — the most progressive in the country — and did so in the face of national criticism from anti-immigrant politicians and many in law enforcement,” Click said.
San Francisco’s sanctuary city law, which was adopted in 1989, predates Newsom’s political career. It prohibited the use of city funds to assist federal immigration enforcement, in an attempt to make undocumented people feel safe to report crimes.
As mayor from 2004 to 2011, Newsom spoke out on behalf of the sanctuary law and railed against federal immigration raids. He also backed a law to give identification cards to all city residents, in a bid to help undocumented San Franciscans access public services. And he started a public ad campaign letting immigrants know they could access city services without being targeted for deportation.
But immigrant advocates say Newsom’s tone changed after the June 2008 slaying of Anthony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16, in San Francisco’s Excelsior District. Edwin Ramos, an undocumented man and gang member from El Salvador, was convicted of three counts of murder in May 2012. Ramos had previously served in San Francisco juvenile probation for violent crimes but had not been deported.
Around the same time, Newsom was hit with embarrassing headlines about his administration’s management of undocumented minors in the criminal justice system. City probation officials were spending tens of thousands of dollars to fly some undocumented kids to their home countries instead of referring them to ICE, while other youth walked away from poorly secured group homes.
So in July 2008 — one day after announcing that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for governor in 2010 — Newsom unveiled his new policy: all undocumented youth charged with felonies would be reported to ICE as soon as they were booked. (The city had previously turned over undocumented adults charged with felonies.)
According to city data, 167 undocumented juveniles were released to ICE under his policy between July 2008 and January 2011. Thirteen had only misdemeanor petitions, not felonies.
Some were kids accused of low-level crimes, like Charles Washington’s 13-year-old stepson. The boy immigrated from Australia along with his brother and mother after she married Washington, a native San Franciscan.
In January 2010, the 13-year-old punched a classmate and took 46 cents from him. He later apologized, and the other kid wasn’t seriously hurt. But prosecutors charged him with assault, robbery and extortion, and under Newsom’s policy, he was referred to ICE. The agency started deportation proceedings against him, his brother and his mother. The three had overstayed their visa waivers, unaware that the mother’s marriage to a U.S citizen wasn’t enough for them stay in the U.S.
Their deportation was deferred at the last minute after the family’s story received media attention. But after months of being forced to wear an ankle monitor while on parole, the mother decided she couldn’t take it anymore, and went back to Australia with her kids.
Washington, a city bus driver, said in an interview last week that he felt Newsom’s policy shattered his family. He doesn’t believe the former mayor would stand up to the federal government and defend California’s sanctuary laws as governor.
“If he didn’t do it for San Francisco, what makes us believe he would do it for the whole state?” Washington said. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots.”
Newsom argued at the time that most of the minors handed over to ICE under the policy had less sympathetic stories, telling the New York Times, “this is not as touchy feely as some people may want to make it.”
His former spokesman said the mayor did a good job of balancing protection for law-abiding immigrants while not harboring criminals.
“The proof that he got it right was that the right-wingers hated his policy and the far left wasn’t too pleased about it either,” said Nathan Ballard last week. “We did not fear that President Obama was going to be needlessly deporting peaceful immigrants… It’s a different world now that we have an openly racist and xenophobic president.”
But Obama actually deported many more immigrants during his first years in office, when Newsom was mayor, than President Trump did during his first year.
The juvenile arrest policy was one of several areas where Newsom charted a more moderate path as mayor than he has in recent years as a candidate for governor, as the Sacramento Bee noted last month. He also took more centrist stances on health care and bail reform, among other issues.
When he was mayor, Newsom’s administration was also quietly working to refer more undocumented immigrants to ICE. Emails between officials in the mayor’s office and the probation department show that city employees conducted a review of at least 1,168 people in their probation database who were not listed as U.S. citizens, reporting at least 372 suspected undocumented immigrants to ICE.
“Staff worked overtime today and made significant progress,” wrote Patrick Boyd, the chief adult probation officer, on September 13, 2008, saying in another email that “we are faxing the ICE notifications each day as reviews are completed.”
Boyd and Kevin Ryan, another Newsom aide involved in that effort, did not respond to requests for comment. Ballard, who is cc’d on the emails, said that the review was “based on compliance with the existing policies” and was unrelated to the policy for juveniles.
The Board of Supervisors voted to overturn Newsom’s juvenile policy in October 2009, requiring convictions for ICE referral, and overrode his veto the next month. But the mayor refused to enforce their ordinance. His administration cited a memo from City Attorney Dennis Herrera, which argued that the supervisors’ reform would be “likely to result in a federal legal challenge,” potentially to the sanctuary city law as a whole — although it also noted that “the law in this area is not well developed.”
Worries about a successful federal lawsuit were unfounded, said Bill Ong Hing, a University of San Francisco law professor who specializes in immigration policy.
“It was not clear, in spite of what he said, that (enforcing the supervisors’ ordinance) would mean any viable legal problem,” Hing said. “Newsom just caved.”
Now that the Trump administration actually is suing California over its sanctuary state law, Hing said, it’s ironic that Newsom has painted himself as a bulwark against the lawsuit.
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Newsom spokesman Click said the former mayor had a stronger past record on sanctuary issues than his Democratic rivals for the governor’s mansion. Click pointed out that while candidate Antonio Villaraigosa was mayor of Los Angeles, the LAPD accepted requests by ICE to temporarily hold thousands of undocumented immigrants before they were convicted of any crime — although those were adults, and that happened under an immigration policy that predated Villaraigosa’s mayoralty.
Villaraigosa spokesman Luis Vizcaino responded: “Gavin Newsom must wake up every morning and look in the mirror at a man who made the decision to deport children in the face of political pressure. He must live with that decision forever — and no amount of baseless political attacks will make that reality go away.”
“Gavin Newsom is directly responsible for having innocent kids deported,” added Fabien Levy, a spokesman for State Treasurer John Chiang, who is also running for governor.
Newsom’s policy was eventually amended by his successor in the mayor’s office, Ed Lee, who ordered in May 2011 that most juveniles with family ties to the Bay Area not be reported to ICE.
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