The Media, the Mayor, the Iron Fist: Its How Governing through Crime Gets Done

-- A San Francisco court's ruling that a 14-year-old drug suspect from Honduras should be considered an abandoned youth - entitled to shelter rather than deportation - was thwarted Wednesday when the city turned him over to federal immigration authorities.

In SFChron, Jaxon Van Derbeken covers the City's new juvenile deportation practice, a change in policy Van Derbeken helped drive with a series of alarmest stories that pilloried the City for having applied its "sanctuary" policy to undocumented juvenile delinquents.

His first stories picked up federal complaints that San Francisco was privately flying undocumented juvenile delinquents back to their countries to avoid detention and deportation by ICE the federal Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency, as well as sending such juveniles to unlocked private juvenile rehabilitation facilities from which some had escaped by walking a way.

Subsequent stories turned up that one of these juveniles that benefited from the sanctuary policy now stands accused of a horrendous murder of a father and two sons.

Facing a possible gubernatorial run in 2010, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom beat a quick retreat on the policy after Van Derbeken's stories appeared. Newsom ordered the city's juvenile probation office to cooperate with federal authorities in deporting all such juveniles.

The resulting practice, now "covered" as news by Van Derbeken, is pure governing through crime. Agents of the executive (who appears as the champion of the people in their identity as potential crime victims), flouts the lawful orders of a court and the individual details of a vulnerable young person's life, handing over a 14 year old to ICE detention practices that have regularly resulted in deaths, and ultimately to being forced on an airplane and taken to a country in which he has no responsible family.