On the 4th of July, hundreds of people sunned themselves at Dolores Park while grilling burgers and drinking six packs of beer. San Francisco is no different than any other City on our nation’s holiday. As many sat watching the mime troupe, most sipping on Trader Joe’s wine or the nearby liquor store purchase, a pack of police officers descended onto the Park, to keep the peace, but mostly to cite individuals for drinking in public. The officers quickly moved through the crowd, making their way to a group of Latino migrant workers. They began to cite the workers.

A group of us noticed this and approached the officers, reminding them that most everyone in the Park had open containers of alcohol, but one female officer was quick to ask us to mind my own business. After they cited the workers, the officers proceeded to hang out and then left-apparently with no interest of citing anyone else in the park, not even people that had grills that had been outlawed years ago for fear of fires. This is one of the worst years for fires in California.

The men were demoralized, have chosen a spot behind a dumpster to hang out, trying to be invisible. One guy from Chiapas, a state in constant civil war in Mexico, almost started to cry, saying that he felt it was very unfair. Immigrants for the most part, are invisible to us. They clean, cook and do the grunt work of this nation and in exchange hide so that they aren’t scapegoated in the current xenophobic climate.

In a recent survey given to active members of La Voz Latina, a Latino family advocacy and community-building organization in the Tenderloin, 100% of the mothers said they felt unsafe in the neighborhood and estimated 80% felt that they could not call the police for fear of prejudice and discrimination based on immigration status. The majority, an estimated 60%, had experienced violence or seen a violent act.

One mother indicated that she had witnessed a fight but was afraid to call because of the language barrier and immigration status. In the end she saw the murder of a man. She regretted not being able to saved that man. Others report being attacked by people on the street but never reporting these incidents of violence. One mom recalled when a man under the influence of drugs attacked her eight-year old daughter on Turk Street, leaving scratches. Our parents have also been the target of police who mistook them for drug dealers and have witnessed police officers beating Honduran youth and threatening to deport them.

The relationship between police and the immigrant community is already on egg shells so it doesn’t help when the San Francisco Chronicle engages in front page immigrant bashing for almost a week, creating a media frenzy on “illegals” dealing crack in the Tenderloin that gave Hanity and Colmes plenty of material to talk about for weeks. Like the rest of the Nation, San Francisco, has also joined the scapegoating wagon. While the mass majority immigrants don’t engage in dealing drugs, they fear the targeting of their children and the general stress created by the frenzy.

The Chronicle seemed to have forgotten that these “crack dealers” are minors, mostly homeless 15 and 16-year-old boys that are themselves trafficked and manipulated by adults. You would think that we were talking about Al Pacino style drug kingpins!

I met “Carlos” when I worked in the Mission years ago. He was also an unaccompanied minor, Central American, who had no roots or family here, paying off a debt to come to the U.S. By the age of 12, he was a sexually exploited minor, an unwilling sex worker. When he got to San Francisco, he dealt drugs to survive and by the age of 16, in juvenile hall. He had an interest in school and loved to read about history. Though he was changing his life, the courts were ready to send him out of the country. He was dropped off at the U.S. Mexico border at the age of 17.

Flying youth back to their home countries was the most humane policy for the probation department to engage in because ICE (Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement) drops minors onto the street. This is in total violation of Declaration of Human Rights which specifically mandates governments to offer “childhood” “special care and assistance.”

Mr. Russoniello, Bush appointee and the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, was quick to condemn the policy of flying back Honduran youth to their country and not hand them over to ICE. Before becoming our San Francisco representative, he defended white-collar criminals. Apparently for him, young boys from Central America selling crack is more of a threat then the corporations that plunder our country of it’s natural resources and deny benefits to our citizens.

I wonder if Mr. Russoniello, knows the history of Honduras, that U.S. corporations like the Standard Fruit company long dominated Honduran politics, creating plantation like work conditions for banana workers. Does he know that the U.S. government in 1954, sanctioned a military coupe to take down a popular strike by banana workers?

We are in part responsible for the devastation of a country, which now boasts the worst human rights abuses, according to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, including the “unlawful killings of youth and children” of thousands of youth suspected of gang affiliation by the police.

The issue of Honduran youth is neither new nor groundbreaking, it has been an issue long identified by community-members and departments alike. A month ago while in the midst of the Mission community meeting, a representative from the District Attorney’s office asked Renee Quinones, director of HOMEY, if his organization could help out with the issue of Honduran youth. Renee indicated that they would love to, but did not have the resources to do so.

The fact is that in San Francisco’s last two years of increasing the police budgets by an estimated 56 million dollars and cutting the budgets of community based organizations working on violence prevention, our crime rates have only increased. Strong-arm law enforcement tactics and xenophobic headlines by the San Francisco Chronicle will only further worsen the already weak relationship between the police and immigrant communities. We are in an election year, and with the aspirations of many politicians in San Francisco, I hope that we don’t stop seeing children as children, begin to challenge our existing policing strategies, and really think about what it means to be a Sanctuary City.