It’s 3 a.m. in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and an all-night, drug-fueled party has been going on for hours. The sidewalks are littered with garbage and human excrement.
Addicts crowd the tunnels, inhaling fentanyl fumes through plastic straws; others are lying down, they don’t know anything. A homeless Makeshift block block behind the block.
Vendors are everywhere. On street corners, groups of men wearing black hoodies and face masks sell drugs.
These are the “Hondos,” immigrants from Honduras who have taken over the drug trade in San Francisco. Every night, they turn the Tenderloin into a profitable, open-air drug market.
We spent three days and three nights in the Tenderloin, talking to addicts, journalists, police and the dealers themselves.
We found that the city’s progressive policies have allowed foreign drug gangs to control the entire neighborhood of downtown San Francisco, poisoning the up and down and bringing Third World conditions to one of America’s wealthiest cities.
For the Tenderloin, Hondos rule.
In 2022, the former mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, appeared to agree in a radio interview, saying that “many” of the drug dealers in the city were Honduran.
His comments sparked an uproar among Latino activists, with one local group denouncing the speech as “xenophobia and racism.” Soon after, Breed was pressured to issue a public apology.
But Breed was right.
Migrant gangs, mainly from Honduras and supplied by Mexican companies, run the fentanyl trade in San Francisco. In 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hondurans “have taken over the sales [fentanyl]”in the city”[open-air markets].” Last year, an article in the Harvard Law Review said that “almost all” of the low-level fentanyl and meth dealers prosecuted as part of the federal sentencing program “were Honduran men without legal status in the United States.”
Why is this happening?
For years, the city has prioritized its “sanctuary” law that makes deportations more difficult; drug liberalization, reducing the imprisonment of dealers and users; and we adopted “housing first” policies, which made cleaning up homeless shelters and forcing addicts into treatment nearly impossible.
This problem did not appear out of nowhere. It is the predictable result of deliberate choice.
In response to a public records request, the San Francisco Police Department provided City Journal with a copy of its policy on immigration enforcement. The document makes it clear that officials are not allowed to “inquire about a person’s immigration status” and cannot ask anyone to produce documents that prove their status.
The police are prohibited, in most cases, from “helping[ing] in the enforcement of federal immigration laws” or honoring ICE detainer requests.
In addition, illegal immigrants prosecuted for drug trafficking in California courts are often released back to the streets of San Francisco.
Predictably, San Francisco’s drug culture, and the tolerance it showed for illegal aliens selling poison, helped fuel the explosion of overdose deaths. By 2023, San Francisco’s overdose death rate was more than double the national average. Between 2020 and 2025, an estimated 4,087 people will die of drug overdoses in the city, with many of those deaths concentrated in the Tenderloin.
By 2023, then-Mayor Breed had declared a state of emergency and reached out to the federal government for help.
In August of that year, the All Hands on Deck initiative began, a new partnership between federal, state and city officials to curb the fentanyl trade. The move saw the federal government step in to prosecute low-level street vendors in the Tenderloin. It also included summary judgment, which would result in “reduction of sentence in return for summary judgment and waiver of due process rights.”
In theory, the provision would enable officials to bypass the city’s sanctuary law and deport undocumented criminals more quickly.
This policy may sound like progress, but some evidence suggests that Honduran criminal networks view the move as a get-out-of-jail-free card rather than a serious threat to their operations.
When Daniel Lurie ran for mayor in 2024, he promised to restore order to a city that had become a global symbol of disorder and decay.
Since taking office in January 2025, Lurie has adopted tougher legislation, reduced the number of homeless shelters and pursued more cooperation between local and federal officials.
But Lurie’s reforms don’t go far enough. For his efforts to be successful, the city must roll back the city’s defenses that have allowed drug gangs to poison the people of San Francisco with impunity.
As long as San Francisco remains a place where you can sell fentanyl with minimal consequences, the open drug markets in the Tenderloin – and all the misery it brings people – will endure.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. Jonathan Choe is a senior executive at the Discovery Institute and a journalist.
