Examiner Editorial: Job training for illegal immigrant drug dealers
June 24, 2009
If it’s worth at least trying to rehabilitate early stage criminals instead of continually throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at an ever-expanding prison system that functions like a revolving door for repeat offenders, something like San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris’ Back on Track job-training program makes sense as an experiment.
Harris’ 4-year-old project gives an alternative to prison for small-time drug dealers between 18 and 30 years old with no record of violence and no more than 7 grams of drugs when arrested. They must plead guilty to enter Back on Track, but their record is expunged after a year of training.
The problem is that Back on Track has apparently been used to train illegal immigrants for U.S. jobs they can never legally hold, along with erase their criminal records. The program came under fire when an illegal immigrant named Alexander Izaguirre was arrested on suspicion of robbery and assault in July 2008 while still participating in the program.
Harris has not officially said how many illegal immigrants participated in Back on Track. But when she found out about Izaguirre, she let everyone following the program rules graduate and have their criminal records cleared.
Local officials had boasted to the Bay Area congressional delegation that Back on Track was a success. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secured $400,000 for it as an earmark in the 2009 federal omnibus spending plan. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s name also showed up as a funding sponsor late in the process. Now, of course, spokespersons for Pelosi and Feinstein say both federal lawmakers need to see big fixes in the program and the appropriation might be pulled.
The assistant district attorney currently heading the jobs program, Sharon Woo, said that since the Izaguirre incident the District Attorney’s Office has begun asking for documentation that proves a Back on Track enrollee can legally work in U.S. Under the previous policy, Back on Track did not enroll criminals whose immigration status was flagged, but the office did not do any independent investigations either.
That common-sense safeguard of verifying whether a criminal who seeks job training can actually have a legal job here was bizarrely overdue. It is yet another maddening example of San Francisco’s uniquely inconsistent approach to dealing with undocumented immigrants who cross the border illegally and then commit crimes in The City.
This latest foul-up is part of the big picture of how every city department seems to interpret the sanctuary policy any way it wants to. If there was a rational policy being followed in San Francisco, undocumented El Salvadoran and alleged gang member Edwin Ramos would have been deported long before allegedly shooting to death a father and two of his sons for no apparent reason.
