New details: Feds target low-level dealers in SF drug market crackdown

In recent weeks, San Francisco and California police have partnered with the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other federal agencies to arrest and swiftly prosecute people accused of selling drugs in the city in an operation dubbed All Hands on Deck.

The initiative seeks to strike at drug dealing in the Tenderloin and SoMa by levying the power of the federal government against lower-level drug dealers in addition to those higher up the supply chain, said Ismail Ramsey, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, who oversees the operation. 

“There are hundreds of people in San Francisco who are dying every year from a fentanyl overdose. We have over 110,000 people nationwide,” Ramsey said Thursday in an interview with the Chronicle. 

“And so this really is all hands on deck, and we need to be coordinated,” he said. “And we think it’s important that people know that that coordination is going on.”

Ramsey, who took office in March, said the operation is in part a response to local officials and community leaders who have called for more federal help amid an unprecedented opioid epidemic. 

The crackdown, which began in August, has contributed to a spike in drug arrests and prosecutions this year, in both local and federal court. U.S. prosecutors in San Francisco leveled at least 89 drug sale cases by the end of October, compared with 55 in all of 2022 and 59 in 2021, according to a Chronicle review of court records. Local police have also presented 34% more drug arrests for prosecution by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office than the average in previous years, city data shows. 

According to city officials, at least 620 people have died from accidental overdoses in San Francisco this year by the end of September, mostly from consuming fentanyl. Overdoses this year are on pace to eclipse those in 2020, which remains the city’s deadliest year on record, with more than 720 fatalities.

The arrests and prosecutions have unfolded even as residents and San Francisco officials clash over how much of the city’s drug crisis can be solved by the criminal justice system. 

Ramsey said he believes “we can’t arrest or imprison our way out of the problem. But we need a strategy that causes people to rethink the cost” of selling drugs, he said. 

Part of that strategy, Ramsey explained, has involved fixing more attention on lower-level dealers. 

These days, FBI and DEA agents have been working alongside San Francisco and state police in making street-level busts, in addition to their more lengthy probes into higher-level drug traffickers, Ramsey said. 

In the past, low-level dealing suspects would be prosecuted mostly in San Francisco courts, where the risk of stiff penalties including prison time and deportation for undocumented immigrants is much lower than in federal court. 

Federal prosecution is now a much more realistic threat. Of the 70 people so far arrested as part of the operation, 40 have received federal charges, Ramsey said. 

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who has called on more federal assistance in San Francisco’s drug markets, said the ramped-up policing was “here to stay” at a news conference Thursday. 

“We are not letting up even as APEC approaches, (and) we are not letting up after APEC goes,” Breed said, referring to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco beginning next week. 

“This, San Francisco, is your progress,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said at the news conference. 

Ramsey described three ways in which some accused of selling drugs on the street could land in federal court. 

One way would be to get arrested selling drugs federal property or an adjacent sidewalk, including the areas surrounding the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at Seventh and Mission streets, the Phillip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse at 450 Golden Gate Ave., and parts of U.N. Plaza. The area around Seventh and Mission in particular has come under national scrutiny as one of the city’s most prolific hot spots for open-air drug dealing and use.

Officials are also randomly selecting at least one day each week in which federal prosecutors will take on a batch of drug-dealing cases that would otherwise be prosecuted in San Francisco courts — provided the cases meet the standards for federal charges. 

This may explain two Oct. 19 arrests at the Hall of Justice, in which DEA agents took into custody two women who were attending hearings on local drug sale charges. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office dropped the cases against the women, and federal prosecutors filed their own, based on the same offenses. One of these cases was soon dismissed by federal prosecutors as well, for reasons not publicly stated. 

Federal officials declined to confirm whether the arrests were part of the All Hands on Deck operation.

The third bucket includes people arrested in joint operations between FBI, DEA and ATF agents and San Francisco police and sheriff’s deputies. 

“​​So those enhanced operations which people have seen, particularly in the evening … those are in coordination with our office,” Ramsey said. 

Ramsey’s office has also sought to speed up prosecutions by offering some low-level offenders plea deals that involve no additional jail time, three years of probation and stay-away orders from the Tenderloin. 

Undocumented individuals facing drug-dealing charges will be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal proceedings. 

A Chronicle review of federal court records found at least 16 defendants were offered the expedited deal to date, of whom 14 were undocumented. Thirteen of the defendants were Honduran, one from El Salvador.

The plea bargains, which are offered only to those with minimal criminal histories, have resolved cases in as little as 10 days as opposed to months or years, and are meant to free up prosecutors to take on more cases.

To accommodate the office’s surging caseload, Ramsey said he’s directed every federal prosecutor to take on at least one drug-dealing case, regardless of the types of cases they usually oversee.

“It doesn’t matter if you are the Theranos prosecutor,” Ramsey said, referring to the recent Silicon Valley blood-testing fraud trial. “You will have one case.”

Ramsey said All Hands on Deck was designed as an answer to the complexities of San Francisco’s modern drug trafficking operation, which has moved from a traditional hierarchy.

“We have basically a decentralized system of individual dealers who are acting as independent contractors,” he said. They’re “being supplied their drugs on a regular basis, and then they’re commuting into San Francisco to deal drugs and then return to their suppliers and then do it all over again.”

Jenkins, whose office is coordinating with U.S. attorneys in the new operation, said Ramsey contacted her just after his appointment to better understand the climate of San Francisco’s drug issues. 

“I think the involvement of Speaker Emerita (Nancy) Pelosi sort of drove many of us to sit down and really talk about how we were going to work together to improve the street conditions here in San Francisco,” Jenkins said, referring to Pelosi’s successful efforts to secure more federal resources for the city’s drug crisis. 

“We needed their assistance in coming in, and not just doing what they normally do, which is generally to address the upper-level, supply-side individuals,” Jenkins said. “We need street-level dealers to fear your system as well.” 

An 18-month Chronicle investigation found that hundreds of San Francisco’s low-level dealers are migrants from one rural area of Honduras, where they often fled violence and extreme poverty. According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former San Francisco dealers from Honduras, the migrants often cross the U.S.-Mexico border with the assistance of Mexican cartels, who then supply the dealers with fentanyl, methamphetamine and other narcotics transported to the Bay Area. 

Because of San Francisco’s and California’s sanctuary policies, most undocumented immigrants convicted of drug crimes in San Francisco courts won’t face deportation. 

Those policies don’t apply to federal crimes, however, and defense attorneys say deportation is a near certainty after a federal drug conviction. 

A handful of critics in recent weeks have taken aim at the fast-track prosecution policies.

Attorneys with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office said San Francisco police and prosecutors are making an end run around the city’s sanctuary policies by allowing suspects to be tried in federal court. 

“Our city should not be spending its resources to funnel immigrants into horrendous conditions in ICE detention,” said Angela Chan, an assistant chief attorney who heads the office’s policy team. “Our Sanctuary law is an expression of San Francisco’s commitment to human rights and against discrimination. Most importantly, Sanctuary is a public safety tool that makes our communities safer.”

Federal public defender Jodi Linker blasted the operation as an example of a “common fallacy” that arresting, jailing or deporting more people will solve the city’s drug problem. 

“We have tried this in the past and it has resulted in our system of mass incarceration of poor people of color and continued the cycles of poverty, addiction, and racial disparities, without increasing public safety,” Linker said in an email to the Chronicle. 

U.S. District Judge William Alsup, however, penned an opposing view, casting the fast-tracked no-prison deals as “extreme leniency.” 

In an Oct. 23 memo filed in one of the federal drug cases, Alsup noted that defendants are still allowed to fight their deportations and may be released while their proceedings are pending. 

If such a release occurred, “we will be back to square one, meaning that the offender, having received no intervention, will likely return to the street to sell fentanyl,” he wrote, asking attorneys to address this risk before sentencing. “Will the lenient program in question serve as an open invitation to come to San Francisco to sell drugs, for even if caught, the worst that is likely to happen will be a few days in jail or a free trip home?”

For the moment, people who live and work in the Tenderloin and SoMa reported promising improvements in street conditions and cheered the more sustained policing. Some of the most chaotic hot spots for drug sales and use are absent of daytime dealers, though much of the activity has now concentrated in the nighttime or moved to different blocks, residents told the Chronicle. 

Heather Milano, a 47-year-old homeless woman who uses fentanyl, said the drug has become scarce since the increase in arrests. 

“It’s hard to find,” she said.

Instead of visiting the dealers’ regular posts, Milano said users now have to go and hunt for them, or wait for a dealer to make contact.

Milano stressed that police have been increasingly arresting users as well.

“It’s not like San Francisco anymore. It’s like how other cities treat people, and it’s sad,” she said. “Now it’s like, you’re bum-rushed by the police at every corner, and most of us are disabled, just trying to find somewhere to get out of that pain.” 

Ramsey said while he hopes the policing efforts ease the city’s overdose rate, the operation is strictly focused on the law-enforcement side of the equation. 

“I’m a law enforcement officer and not a policy maker; I leave that to the folks to have expertise in that area,” he said. “But I sure hope we can do our part.” 

Chronicle staff photographer Gabrielle Lurie and staff writer Megan Munce contributed to this report.