Much work still to do in San Francisco’s – Latest News
It’s 3 a.m. in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and an all-night, drug-fueled social gathering has been raging for hours. The sidewalks are plagued by trash and human feces.
Addicts huddle in the alleys, inhaling fentanyl fumes by way of plastic straws; others are slumped over, barely aware. Makeshift homeless encampments line block after block.
Dealers are in every single place. On the road corners, teams of males dressed in darkish hoodies and face masks sell medication.
These are the “Hondos,” migrants from Honduras who’ve taken over the San Francisco drug commerce. Night after evening, they flip the Tenderloin into a profitable, open-air drug market.
A homeless man is seen on a sidewalk in San Francisco, California, United States on December 8, 2025. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu by way of Getty Images
We spent three days and nights in the Tenderloin, speaking to addicts, journalists, cops and the sellers themselves.
We found that the town’s progressive insurance policies have allowed international drug gangs to take over an complete neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, poisoning the down-and-out and bringing Third World situations to one of America’s wealthiest cities.
In the Tenderloin, the Hondos rule.
In 2022, former San Francisco mayor London Breed appeared to admit as a lot in a radio interview, saying that “a lot” of the town’s drug sellers had been Honduran.
Her feedback sparked a wave of backlash from Latino activists, with one native group denouncing the remarks as “xenophobic and racist.” Soon after, Breed was pressured into issuing a public apology.
But Breed was proper.
A road in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District is full of homeless encampments and people. Anadolu Agency by way of Getty Images
Gangs of migrants, primarily from Honduras and provided by Mexican cartels, run the fentanyl commerce in San Francisco. In 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hondurans had “taken over the sale of [fentanyl]” in the town’s “[open-air markets].” Last yr, an article in the Harvard Law Review acknowledged that “nearly all” low-level fentanyl and meth sellers prosecuted as half of a federal sentencing program had been “Honduran men without legal status in the United States.”
Why is that this taking place?
For years, the town has prioritized its “sanctuary” law that make deportations more tough; relaxed drug enforcement, limiting arrests of sellers and customers; and embraced “housing first” insurance policies, which make cleansing up homeless encampments and coercing addicts into remedy almost unimaginable.
This disaster didn’t come from nowhere. It is the predictable end result of deliberate selections.
In response to a public information request, the San Francisco Police Department supplied City Journal with a copy of its coverage on immigration enforcement. The doc makes clear that officers aren’t allowed to “inquire into an individual’s immigration status” and can’t ask anybody to produce paperwork proving his or her standing.
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Officers are barred, in many circumstances, from “assist[ing] in the enforcement of federal immigration laws” or honoring ICE detainer requests.
In addition, unlawful migrants prosecuted for drug dealing in California courts have been repeatedly launched back onto San Francisco’s streets.
Predictably, San Francisco’s permissive drug tradition, and the tolerance it confirmed to unlawful aliens peddling poison, helped drive an explosion of overdose deaths. In 2023, San Francisco’s overdose-death price was more than double the national average. Between 2020 and 2025, an estimated whole of 4,087 people died of overdoses in the town, with many of these deaths clustered in the Tenderloin.
By 2023, then-Mayor Breed had declared a state of emergency and reached out to the federal authorities for help.
In August of that yr, the All Hands on Deck initiative started, a new partnership between federal, state and metropolis officers to crack down on fentanyl dealing. The initiative noticed the federal authorities step in to prosecute low-level road sellers in the Tenderloin. It additionally included fast-track sentencing, which might end result in a “reduced sentence in return for a quick plea and waiver of procedural rights.”
In concept, this association would allow officers to bypass the town’s sanctuary law and deport undocumented criminals shortly.
This coverage would possibly sound like progress, however some proof means that the Honduran prison networks view the initiative more as a get-out-of-jail free card than a critical risk to their operations.
When Daniel Lurie ran for mayor in 2024, he promised to restore order to a metropolis that had turn into an worldwide image of dysfunction and decline.
Since taking workplace in January 2025, Lurie has embraced harder enforcement, diminished the extent of seen homeless encampments and pursued elevated cooperation between native and federal officers.
But Lurie’s reforms do not go far enough. For his efforts to succeed, the town should roll back the sanctuary metropolis protections which have allowed international drug gangs to poison people in San Francisco with impunity.
As long as San Francisco stays a place the place you’ll be able to sell fentanyl with minimal penalties, the open-air drug markets in the Tenderloin — and all of the human distress they convey — will endure.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow on the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the writer of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter on the Manhattan Institute. Jonathan Choe is a senior fellow on the Discovery Institute and a journalist.
