Give ’em an inch, and they’ll take a mile *UPDATED*

San Francisco recently abandoned its policy of giving refuge to illegal immigrants if they were juvenile offenders.  Now, unsurprisingly, we learn that criminals were taking advantage of the City’s useful idiot policy and playing it for all it was worth.  You see, almost a third of the so-called “juvenile” offenders the City was protecting were, in fact, adults:

Nearly 30 percent of the felony offenders San Francisco juvenile justice officials have reported to federal immigration authorities since the city stopped shielding youths from deportation have turned out to be adults, authorities say.

The city’s Juvenile Probation Department has referred 58 offenders to federal authorities since Mayor Gavin Newsom announced July 2 that the city no longer would protect youths from deportation under San Francisco’s sanctuary law. The mayor took the step after The Chronicle revealed that the city was paying for flights home and $7,000-a-month group homes for underage, undocumented offenders, who as adults could face prison and automatic deportation.

Of those 58 offenders, authorities have concluded that 17 – or 29.3 percent – were adults, based on immigration records and the statements of offenders themselves, federal immigration officials say. Most of the 58 were being held on drug-dealing charges.

“It confirms our early suspicion that adults were taking advantage of the sanctuary policy in order to evade detection, responsibility and prosecution for criminal behavior,” said Joseph Russoniello, the U.S. attorney for Northern California.

If you read the whole article, you see the usual suspects try to make us weep tears for “genuine” 16 or 17 year old violent gang bangers who are here illegally, but my heart strings remained un-wrung.  The plea on behalf of these “they shouldn’t be here in the first place” criminals especially fails becuase, if you read the article to the end, you discover that San Francisco, by actually following the law regarding illegal immigrants, has freed up enormous pressure on S.F.’s own juvenile hall — which means that maybe, just maybe, that institution can actually help juvenile offenders who are American citizens and can be salvaged before they embark on a soul destroying life of crime.

UPDATEIt turns out that hundreds of adult offenders figured that they could piggy-back on SF’s useful idiot policy.  Words fail me.