Charlie Neibergall/ASSOCIATED PRESS Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who is running for president,

A few years ago a teenager in San Francisco made a mistake that landed him in immigration detention. One day after school, the 13-year-old punched his classmate and stole 46 cents. The student, an undocumented immigrant from Australia, apologized, but the school called the police, who turned the teen over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE detained him for a few days and threatened to deport him and his family. “He was traumatized and he was scared,” said Angela Chan, the policy director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus and the immigration attorney who represented the boy and his family. “It is a human rights violation to separate a young child from their family for an adolescent mistake,” Chan told HuffPost. It was no accident the teenager ended up detained by ICE back in 2010. More than 100 immigrant youth in San Francisco were detained or deported because of a 2008 city policy implemented by former mayor and now-Gov. Gavin Newsom and supported by Kamala Harris, then the city’s district attorney, who is now a Democratic senator running for president. Though San Francisco is a sanctuary city, the policy required police to notify ICE about undocumented youth arrested for felonies, in some cases for minor crimes. The juveniles were handed over even before guilt or innocence was proved. Immigration advocates told HuffPost that Harris needs to publicly revoke her support for the policy and acknowledge the trauma it caused San Francisco’s undocumented youth and their families. Otherwise, they say, she cannot be a credible voice on immigrant rights, an issue that will be at the forefront of the 2020 election. “This was one of the worst human rights crises we saw in San Francisco in the last 30 years,” said Francisco Ugarte, the managing immigration attorney with San Francisco’s Public Defender’s Office. After the publication of this article, Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams told HuffPost that the senator “thinks the policy was a mistake and wouldn’t support something like it today.” Prior to publication, Harris had defended her support for the policy, which was changed in 2011 when Newsom left office.

This was one of the worst human rights crises we saw in San Francisco in the last 30 years. Francisco Ugarte, immigration attorney with San Francisco’s Public Defender’s Office

On Feb. 11, Sams said in a statement to CNN that the policy was intended to protect the sanctuary status of San Francisco and to ensure police maintained strong relationships with immigrant communities. “Looking back, this policy could have been applied more fairly,” Sams said. In an interview Sunday with Political Party Live, a podcast about Iowa politics, Harris said the fact that juveniles were turned over to ICE before they were even convicted of a felony was an “unintended consequence” that she did not support. But immigration advocates say the stated purpose of the policy was to report undocumented youth to immigration authorities without giving them due process and told HuffPost that Harris’ statement is confusing and contradictory. “Until she recognizes that what she did was a mistake, I don’t think she will have the credibility of a champion,” said David Campos, chairman of the San Francisco Democratic Party and former member of the city’s Board of Supervisors. Harris’ statement references the fact that last year, Newsom told The Sacramento Bee that the policy was designed to protect San Francisco’s sanctuary status, which limits the city’s cooperation with ICE, at a time when it was under attack by the federal government because of a high-profile triple murder committed by an undocumented immigrant. Newsom said he thought the approach was a compromise that would appease critics enough to leave the city’s sanctuary ordinance intact. Chan, the lawyer for the teenager detained by ICE, said Newsom’s policy created panic in the community and undercut any trust immigrants had in police. The threat of deportation made immigrant victims and witnesses afraid to report crimes, she said, and immigrant parents were fearful of sending their kids to school in case the police got involved in a classroom incident.

There’s no reason for any official to be defending or rationalizing draconian deportation policies that are part of California’s past. Salvador Sarmiento, National Day Laborer Organizing Network