San Francisco's "Sanctuary City" Sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi, was soundly thrashed in his re-election bid by Vicki Hennessy, a former official in the Sheriff's Department. As of early vote counts on Wednesday morning, Mirkarimi was losing 62% to 31% to Hennessy.
Sheriff Mirkarimi came on the national scene last summer with the homicide of 32-year-old Kate Steinle on San Francisco's waterfront July 1, by illegal immigrant Francisco Sanchez, who allegedly shot and killed Steinle while she was walking along the waterfront with her father.
The Sheriff's Office previously failed to honor a federal request to hold Sanchez on an unrelated legal issue for federal pickup. Sheriff Mirkarimi vociferously and vigorously defended the concept of sanctuary cities in all of his media comments.
This incident, possibly more than any other, brought to the forefront the development of the concept of sanctuary cities around the country. Many cities run by liberal Democrats have refused to cooperate with the federal government on issues surrounding illegal immigrants with multiple local or state arrest records. Sanctuary cities are refusing to turn over illegal immigrants to the federal government when they are arrested for lesser local or state crimes.
It should be remembered that Mirkarimi was not the only San Francisco official to support the concept of sanctuary cities. The mayor, for one, supported San Francisco as a sanctuary city. Unfortunately the mayor and those on the SF City Council were not standing for election or else we would have a better understanding of where San Francisco stands, today, on it being a sanctuary city. The SF mayor did endorse and support Mirkarimi's opponent, Vicki Hennessy.
Still further, Mirkarimi had involved himself in other activities that made him a pariah within the Sheriff's Department and city administration, so we can not say the sanctuary city issue was the only cause of Mirkarimi's loss, just the most notable.
What most people do not know is that San Francisco by ordinance declared itself to be a sanctuary city way back in 1989 and reaffirmed its status again in 2013 with an additional ordinance.
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