Tag Archives: Kate Steinle

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San Francisco jury finds illegal immigrant who shot Kate Steinle dead not guilty

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Kathryn Steinle was murdered by an illegal immigrant.

(Photo: Kate Steinle)

A San Francisco jury refused to convict the illegal immigrant who shot Kate Steinle dead. Canadian conservative Mark Steyn reacted to the news on Fox News:

Excerpt:

Mark Steyn joined Tucker Carlson to react to the not guilty verdict in the Kate Steinle murder trial.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal immigrant who had been deported multiple times, shot and killed Steinle while she was walking on a San Francisco pier with her father in July 2015.

Zarate admitted to shooting Steinle, but said it was an accident. He avoided a second-degree murder conviction, although he was found guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The shooting sparked a national debate over illegal immigration and sanctuary cities.

“It is a miscarriage of justice in the profoundest sense in that Kate Steinle is dead because she went for a walk in a popular destination in her own city and her parents will never see anybody convicted for that crime,” Steyn said.

He said there is no dispute that Zarate fired the shot that killed Steinle or that he should not have been in the U.S. in the first place.

“Why is one political party, the entire bureaucracy and two-thirds of the remaining political party fetishizing and sentimentalizing immigrants who can’t speak the language, with a grade two education, and setting up competing jurisdictions in this country that protect them at the expense of American citizens?” Steyn said.

The Daily Signal recaps the shooter’s criminal record:

A Mexican national, Zarate–then known as Juan Francisco López-Sánchez–is a seven-time convicted felon who had been deported from the U.S. five times before the shooting.

Just months before the shooting, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials lodged an immigration detainer for Zarate with the San Francisco sheriff’s office, which declined the request.

In an interview with local media, Zarate said he had made his way to San Francisco because he knew he would be less likely to be deported because of the city’s sanctuary policies. 

Ted Cruz just tweeted that he wanted the Senate to vote on the “Kate’s law” bill, which has already passed the Republican-majority House in June 2017. The bill imposes criminal penalties on illegal immigrants who are deported, but then re-enter the United States illegally again. The sentences are tougher for illegal immigrants who already had criminal convictions before re-entering.

The Senate, which is populated with more liberal Republicans, has refused to do anything with the bill. Certainly, the bill would not get the votes of any Democrats in the Senate. 166 Democrats voted against it in the House.

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Are illegal immigrants more likely to commit crimes than the general public?

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Kathryn Steinle was murdered by an illegal immigrant.
Kathryn Steinle was murdered by an illegal immigrant.

So we had a case in the news where an illegal immigrant who had been arrested and deported numerous times was allowed to stay in the U.S. thanks to San Francisco’s very Democrat “sanctuary city” policy. All the people running for the Democrat presidential nomination support sanctuary cities, and amnesty for illegal immigrants as well. But how do these policies affect American taxpayers?

Breitbart News has the numbers from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Excerpt:

While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.

Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.

Now a lot of those convictions will be related to immigration… what happens when we take those out?

The sentencing rate is still higher than normal:

Eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants would account for 13.6 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.

All that crime is not only dangerous and expensive, but we have to pay for the fails and law enforcement to catch them, too. Now, let’s review Hillary Clinton’s views on illegal immigration.

The Washington Times reports that she favors amnesty:

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Tuesday that if elected, she would try to expand President Obama’s deportation amnesty to more illegal immigrants, saying this administration has left out a number of aliens who deserve to be granted legal status.

Speaking in Las Vegas at a Cinco de Mayo meeting focused on immigration, Mrs. Clinton also called for granting attorneys to illegal immigrants facing the complex immigration system, and said she would like to re-examine detention to ensure more illegal immigrants are released as they await deportation.

Mrs. Clinton delivered on just about every question from immigrant rights activists, who had been pressing her to reject Mr. Obama’s detention policies and go beyond his amnesty.

The Daily Caller reminds us that she also supports sanctuary cities:

Clinton last weighed in publicly on sanctuary cities during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“You would allow the sanctuary cities to disobey the federal law?” Clinton was asked by Tim Russert during a Sept. 6, 2007, debate at Dartmouth College.

“Well, I don’t think there is any choice,” she responded.

Clinton said she backed the sanctuary city concept because without it, illegal immigrants refuse to cooperate with police because they are afraid of being deported.

“Local law enforcement has a different job than federal immigration enforcement,” Clinton said. “The problem is the federal government has totally abdicated its responsibility.”

Clinton again expressed her support for sanctuary cities in a 2008 interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.

“Are you going to crack down on the sanctuary cities?” O’Reilly asked.

“No, I’m not,” Clinton said, eliciting a shocked response from the host.

I’m all for more skilled immigration, but that’s not what is happening on our southern border. If Hillary becomes president, that situation will only get worse.

News

Family of woman murdered by illegal immigrant sues sanctuary city

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Is it time for justice for the victims of Democrat policies?
Is it time for justice for the victims of Democrat policies?

Investors Business Daily has some good news, something that makes me hopeful of the future.

Excerpt:

The family of Kate Steinle, the young woman gunned down by an illegal alien in San Francisco, is suing the city and its enablers. How sad nothing’s changed since her death, and lawsuits are all citizens have left.

After enduring a round of crocodile tears and flapdoodle from city officials — and a noticeable silence from the White House — it was obvious to the family of Kathryn Steinle, the 32-year-old woman gunned down in broad daylight by a five-times-deported illegal, that the powers that be in the sanctuary city of San Francisco and in the federal government would try to ignore the death of their daughter.

After all, the San Francisco and federal governments encouraged the non-enforcement of immigration laws and were banking on the public forgetting how illegal aliens are committing heinous crimes with impunity against Americans, shielded by sanctuary city policies.

Business as usual could go on. Or so they hoped.

Except that the Steinles have decided not to let this one go. On Tuesday, they filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, its sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the Bureau of Land Management, whose insufficiently secured gun became the illegal’s murder weapon.

“We’re frustrated,” said Brad Steinle, the dead woman’s brother, at a news conference on the steps of City Hall on Tuesday. “Because the system failed our sister. And at this point, nobody has taken responsibility, accountability. And nothing has changed.”

“We’re here not only for Kate, we’re here for every citizen of this country who comes to San Francisco,” said her father, Jim Steinle. “If you think this can’t happen to you, think again.”

He recalled how, strolling in broad daylight on a tourist pier in San Francisco last July, he watched as Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, with a long criminal career behind him, gunned his daughter down.

The illegal later admitted to investigators that he was attracted to San Francisco for its sanctuary city policies.

So far, we have not seen a lot of progress in punishing Hillary Clinton for sending and receiving classified e-mails, and storing them on a thumb drive to give to her lawyer. We have not seen a lot of progress in investigating and de-funding Planned Parenthood for alleged criminal activities. We have not seen a lot of progress at punishing the IRS for persecuting conservative groups ahead of the 2012 election, in order to suppress their influence so that Obama could be re-elected. It sometimes seems impossible to hold the Democrats accountable for the harm they do with their delusional laws and policies. And the media successfully covers up the greed, corruption and destructive incompetence.

Until now.

This time, it’s very clear that the Democrats are responsible for what happened to Kate Steinle. This criminal was released without informing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. That refusal to follow the law cost Kate Steinle her life. And it showed the world the consequences of leftist ideology. The left is soft on illegal immigrants who commit crimes and/or take unfair advantage of social programs. The left is soft on crime – they would rather favor the criminal over the victim of the criminal. They don’t like moral judgments. They don’t like when people reap what they sow. They call evil good, and good evil, and they feel compassion when they fix the problems of evil people by taking away from what good people have earned.

So often, the public is deliberately deceived by the media about the effects of leftist policies. We won’t see the consequences of Obama running up 10 trillion in new debt right away. We won’t see the consequences to the crime rate for rewarding women who choose to create fatherless children. We don’t see the consequences of redefining marriage on the next generation of taxpayers. We don’t see the consequences of legalizing no-fault divorce right away. We don’t see the effect on our social safety net when we abort the next generation of taxpayers and create a demographic crisis. Liberals seem to be impossible to hold accountable. They just keep talking and talking about how generous they are with other people’s money, and how compassionate they are to favor evildoers over innocent citizens.

But this time, the mask is off. Now we know the consequences of wanting to be generous with law-breakers. Now we realize that relaxing the rules in order to be “nice” actually does harm to innocent people. And if this lawsuit succeeds, and the Steinles get justice, maybe it will be the beginning of government becoming accountable to the people. The solution to bad government is holding the government leaders accountable for their mistakes right away. And I think the mistakes are going to become easier to spot as the money for welfare spending runs out, and people have to pay for their own poor decision-making.