Op-ed:
Sanctuary Cities...Harboring Injustice
By: Diane Sori and Craig Andresen / Right Side Patriots
"A disgraceful
verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country
are so angry with Illegal Immigration." -
President Donald Trump
He was knowingly here illegally,
in fact he had already been deported five times before and yet he always
did manage to return. And it was during his sixth and last return that
this illegal alien murdered an innocent 32-year old woman in the
prime of her life...and so Kate Steinle became the rallying cry for
all that is so very wrong with our immigration system.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate...aka Juan Francisco Lopes-Sanchez...an
illegal Mexican with a lengthy felony record...was found 'not
guilty' of murdering Kate Steinle by a San Francisco jury of six men
and six women. Not guilty of murder in the first degree nor in the
second degree, Zarate was also acquitted of involuntary manslaughter
with the sole guilty charge leveled against him being the much lesser
charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
In other
words, Kate Steinle's killer basically walks free...free after he is
once again deported back to Mexico...while there is no justice for
the the innocent girl killed nor for her parents who now live a life
of hell no parent should ever be forced to live...a life knowing
their daughter's death took a backseat to the life of a piece of
human garbage whose mere existence in our country was against our
laws.
By now we all know the story of how Kate Steinle was killed on
July 1, 2015, while lazily walking along a San Francisco pier with
her dad enjoying the hot summer day...and how a shot rang out seeing
Kate dropping to the ground, being cradled in her dad's arms with
her last words spoken, “help me dad.” Shot in the back by
what this jury deemed was an accidental shooting that was anything
but, the jury was charged with deciding whether Zarate intentionally
and willfully fired the single shot that killed Kate Steinle or
whether it was as the defense claimed 'unintentional'...a freak
accident...after Zarate found the gun wrapped in a cloth under his
seat at the pier, that it accidentally discharged with the bullet
ricocheting off of the concrete surface and into Steinle's back.
So while this scenario was deemed plausible to the
jury... plausible enough to find Zarate 'not guilty'...it might have
resulted in a vastly different verdict if the jury in Judge Samuel Feng’s
courtroom had been allowed to hear that the gun had been stolen just four
days before the killing from the parked car of a visiting Bureau of
Land Management ranger. And while even the prosecution agreed that
there was no evidence linking Zarate to that particular robbery,
sometimes no evidence is evidence in and of itself especially when
also kept from the jury was the fact that Zarate had been deported
five times before, and that in 2015 he was scheduled for a sixth
deportation having then been in federal custody for felony
're-entry.'
But instead of their deporting him when they had the chance,
federal authorities sent Zarate to San Francisco on a 20-year-old drug
warrant for possession of a small amount of marijuana, where San Francisco
prosecutors dropped the charge and the sheriff's department let him
go...let him go despite a federal detainer request.
Two months after the charges were dropped Kate Steinle lay dead.
And it was only after the 'not guilty' verdict had been reached
that an amended federal arrest warrant was reissued for Zarate...a
warrant stating that he did indeed violate his court mandated
supervised release on a previous federal sentence for illegally
re-entering our country now being coupled with his being a convicted
felon possessing the gun that killed Kate Steinle.
But no matter,
because with just a three or so year sentence as per current sentence
guidelines, and with factoring in 'time served,' Zarate could see
himself being deported back to Mexico within less than year's
time...deported back as he plots and plans how to re-enter our country for the
seventh time, while Kate Stenle remains dead.
A true miscarriage of justice unseen since the OJ Simpson verdict
back in the '90's, this nightmare stems directly from San Francisco
being a sanctuary city in the now sanctuary state of California, and
with local sanctuary city laws stating that local law enforcement do
not have to hold an individual beyond the term of their
incarceration. And so San Francisco decided back in 2015 not to honor
any federal ICE detainer requests, that is unless a detainee is
proven to have had committed a violent or serious felony within the
past seven years...and this continues today.
And with her death Kate Steinle truly did become ground zero for
the nightmare scenario that is sanctuary cities...which by the way is
not a legal term...replete with said city's policies hindering local
authorities from cooperating with federal immigration agents.
Remember, if those policies had not been in place Zarate would have
been turned over to ICE back in the spring of 2015, and Kate Steinle
would be alive today.
“A day of vindication for the rest of immigrants,” so
said Zarate's defense attorney Francisco Ugarte yet this verdict is
anything but as the backlash against illegals and sanctuary
cities grows stronger by the day...and might we add rightfully so for
two simple truths are that Zarate was not supposed to be here and yet
he was, and that our existing immigration laws were passed to protect
American citizens not to protect illegal criminal aliens.
So what exactly are sanctuary cities...which is not a new concept
but has been around since Biblical times...besides being breeding
grounds for those wishing to do Americans harm while at the same time
being a place where criminals relish in raking in the benefits this
country has to offer. A federally funded safe haven, sanctuary cities
limit their cooperation with the federal government in order to help
illegals avoid deportation by ICE agents...and if truth be told also
to help increase the Democrats voting roster.
And while President Trump wants to pull said federal funding for
cities that refuse to comply with ICE deportation requests, many
sanctuary cities are fighting back against a cut in funding while
they await a federal court ruling against the legality of withholding
such funding. And to give you an idea of just how much funding these
cities would loose, know that in Fiscal Year 2016 alone Obama sent
$26.74 billion in federal
funding to America’s 106 sanctuary cities... funding they
desperately needed to feed, house, cloth, and educate those who came
to our country illegally...those who are criminals by their very act
of doing so. And know that during the entirety of the Obama years
illegal immigration cost we state taxpayers $89 billion with the feds
adding in another $46 billion, bringing the total to fund sanctuary
cities up to a whopping $135 billion...monies that should have been spent
on American citizens instead.
Now here's something most don't know...sometimes sanctuary cities
aren’t just cities per se. In fact, across
America, there are over 300 governmental jurisdictions claiming
sanctuary status including 106 actual cities, four
states (California, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Colorado), and with
the rest being counties or other units of government. But their joint
commonality is that all have officially enacted sanctuary policies,
with most refusing to honor ICE detainers warrants.
Thankfully, on January 25, 2017 President Trump signed Executive
Order 13768 directing the Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney
General Jeff Sessions to defund sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse
to comply with federal immigration law. So while at least 33 states
have considered enacting such laws to crack down on sanctuary cities,
Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Texas have already passed laws
that punish local governments that enact policies that protect and shelter
illegals
In fact, Indiana Rep. Todd Rokita recently introduced a bill that
could hold what he calls “lawless” state and local
politicians and officials accountable with criminal penalties if they
choose to obstruct federal immigration authority efforts. Specifically targeting sanctuary
cities, H.R. 4526...the Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians
(SLAP) Act...could see any and all violators facing up to five years of prison
time and a fine of up to $1 million for willfully ignoring the federal
government's requests for custody of undocumented individuals. It's a start...a very good start indeed.
And with other states and elected officials now planning to jump
on the anti-sanctuary city bandwagon, a war of words has started as
those in favor of sanctuary cities and the policies surrounding them
claim said cities are being made safer because they foster positive
relationships between illegals and law enforcement; that they are
legal and protected by the tenth amendment* (re: separation of
federal and state powers); and that said cities protect what they
call 'undocumented immigrants' from federal immigration laws.
Countering them are those who say sanctuary city policies allow
dangerous and violent illegal aliens the ability to roam free to
threaten the safety of both their communities and law-abiding
American citizens; that said cities defy federal laws by which state
and local governments are bound as per 8 U.S. Code § 1373**; and
that these cities prevent both local and state police officers from
doing their jobs.
And the opposition to sanctuary
cities is rightfully growing in
numbers by the day not only because of the miscarriage of justice
regarding the Kate Steinle verdict; not only because thousands of
Americans die each year at the hands of illegals; but also because
the hypocrisy of the left is now on full display for all to see as
their ad-nauseum call for more gun control has been drowned out by
their silence because one of their protected sorts basically got off
scot-free.
In
the wake of the Kate Steinle murder verdict, while the liberals continue
to do everything possible to both harbor and protect those who
simply by setting foot in our country illegally are criminals. And in
sanctuary cities and in sanctuary states one thing is quite
conspicuous in its abject silence...liberal calls for gun control. And how
exactly does the liberal gun control agenda fit into all of this...simply it doesn’t.
In
this case, and in others that we’ve both seen, and will see as time
marches on and the illegal alien flood into sanctuary cities and
states continues, a criminal, as cited above, who was also a felon,
deported five times and being protected by the liberal agenda, stole
a gun, was a felon in possession of a gun, and used that gun in the
commission of yet another felony...the murder of Kate Steinle...was
acquitted of the charges by a liberal jury, and yet, not a word
concerning their gun control agenda.
To
be perfectly frank, and brutally politically direct about this, had
the killer of Kate Steinle been anything but a protected class
non-citizen, the outcry from the left for more gun control would be
deafening.
As
it is, the silence is now what’s deafening, and that places the
spotlight squarely upon liberal hypocrisy.
To
be fair, no amount of gun control would have kept Kate Steinle alive,
so it is not at all that we’re preaching gun control here. The
facts regarding liberal gun control are more than evident in Chicago,
a bastion of liberalism with the strictest anti-gun laws in the
nation...a city seeing 3,382 shootings with 587 people killed in those
shootings in 2017, and the year isn’t over yet.
Such
figures also put the spotlight on yet another of liberalism’s many
hypocritical failures in that the vast majority of the shootings and
resulting murders in the gun-free, target-rich zone of Chicago, are
crimes committed by blacks, against blacks.
Just
as illegal aliens are considered the sole purview of liberals, so too
is the black community, and yet black on black crime, which is
culpable in some 93 percent of all black murders in this country, as
per FBI statistics, never raises so much as a liberal eyebrow, much
less a liberal outcry.
If
you need more proof of the hypocritical double standard regarding
Kate Steinle and liberal demands for gun control, or in this case
their lack of such demands, look no further than Barack Hussein Obama
who, since the murder of Kate Steinle in 2015 by an illegal alien with a
string of felonies and deportations glued to him, has remained silent
regarding the crime, the victim, and for that matter the killer.
When
Michael Brown, for instance, a thug and a thief, was shot by a police
officer in the process of attacking that officer, Obama spoke out
within three days, demanded more gun control, ordered an
investigation by the DOJ into the justified shooting and sent his
representatives to the dead thug’s funeral.
Has
Obama spoken out in regards to Kate Steinle? No. Has he spoken out
calling for gun control using the killing of Steinle as his platform?
No. Has Obama uttered even a single word against the illegal alien
and felon, five times deported who murdered Kate Steinle? No, no he has
not.
And
what of Nancy Pelosi, in whose backyard if not her front yard, this
murder took place?
Well,
Nancy Pelosi did, in fact, issue one singular call for more gun
control exactly one week after the murder of Kate Steinle, stating,
“Last week, in San Francisco, our city suffered our own senseless
act of gun violence with the killing of Kathryn Steinle, and our
thoughts and prayers are very much with her family. Today, we
must do more as a nation to prevent dangerous people from getting
easy access to guns. And Congress has a moral responsibility to
act. What is so unclear? What do they not understand about
that? The memory of these victims, the cries of their families
deserve action – results, not words.”
Since
that rather obtuse statement, Pelosi has been conspicuously quite, as
though the liberal elite shut her down because the illegal alien was
somehow a more protected class than an American citizen, but notice a
very important aspect of Pelosi’s statement...“we must do more
as a nation to prevent dangerous people from getting easy access to
guns. And Congress has a moral responsibility to act. What
is so unclear? What do they not understand about that?”
Let’s
be clear here in that it wasn’t the gun that killed Kate Steinle,
it was in fact, the illegal alien who had already been deported five times, had a string of felonies attached to him, and was, not least
of all, living in a sanctuary city...her sanctuary city to be exact.
Gun
control was what Pelosi was preaching a week after Steinle was
murdered...not illegal alien control, and why do you suppose that
was? Because guns can’t vote, and because California issues
driver’s licenses, and registers illegal aliens to do just
that...vote.
On
January 1, 2015, California’s AB 60 law went into
effect, and illegal aliens flooded DMV locations to take full
advantage, getting driver’s licenses. Couple that with yet another
California law, AB 1461, which is a motor-voter law that registers
holders of a California driver’s license to vote, and you have the
perfect liberal storm...illegal aliens with voter registration forms.
In
the state of California today, there are some 800,000 illegal aliens
who because of the combination of the two laws, have been registered
to vote, and while it’s illegal for them to cast a vote, the laws
have no teeth. In fact, it’s up to the illegal...those who have
broken the law by being in this country to begin with...to police
themselves, and not vote.
Illegal
aliens in California are on the honor system when it comes to
voting, and to be once again perfectly frank, the honor system
becomes an abject failure when it is left to those who do not honor
our nation’s laws, to suddenly show honor for our nation’s laws.
According
to Claude Arnold, a former Special Agent in Charge for the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations
in Southern California, as well as in the states of Nevada,
Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, “Throughout
my 27-year career with [Immigration and Naturalization Service] and
ICE, I arrested hundreds of illegal criminal aliens who had voter
registration cards. They would often admit they voted, but they were
rarely prosecuted for illegally voting.”
Putting
a finer point on it, Arnold stated that of the hundreds of illegal
aliens he has personally arrested over the years, who were registered
to vote, only once was an illegal alien registered as a Republican.
All the rest, he said, were registered as Democrats.
Let’s
now put this into context with the Kate Steinle murder, and Nancy
Pelosi’s statement...Pelosi called for gun control after Steinle’s
murder, and not for illegal alien control... because guns don’t
vote, and illegal aliens do.
In
the liberal world, guns are not a voting bloc, so liberals can, and
do call for all the laws they want for the purpose of banning guns,
and this is exactly why you don’t hear them begging for, or
demanding laws to ban illegal aliens from flooding into our country,
of holing up in liberal controlled sanctuary cities or states.
It’s
not that liberals just don’t know where the true responsibility
lies for the murder of Kate Steinle...it’s that they absolutely do
know...and simply don’t give a damn.
Sanctuary
cities, and sanctuary states, set up by liberals as safe havens for
criminals for no other purpose than to protect an illegal voting bloc
have no place in a nation of laws...no place in our Constitutional
Republic. Such cities and states should be defunded from federal
assistance dollars, paid by legal citizens, so that liberals can
flaunt the laws of the land.
Further,
to diminish the future possibilities of more parents having to bury
their children, or children having to bury their parents because of
the actions of those who shouldn’t even be here in the first place,
stricter border enforcement, a wall, and harsher penalties for those
who commit crimes while in this country illegally must be adopted,
and used.
It’s
not an abundance of guns that caused the murder of Kate Steinle, it
is the absence of a wall that was a direct contributor in the
equation, and a liberal agenda that aided and abetted in Miss
Steinle’s murder.
To
quote Nancy Pelosi..."What is so unclear? What do they not
understand about that?”
____________________________
* Tenth Amendment: the
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively,
or to the people.
** 8 U.S. Code § 1373: Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law, a Federal, State,
or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way
restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or
receiving from, the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.
Copyright © 2017 Diane Sori and
Craig Andresen / Right Side Patriots
*******************************************************************************************
RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS...LIVE!
Today, Friday, December 8th from 7 to 9pm EST on American Political Radio, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss sanctuary cities as the harbor of injustice, Trump's announcement on Jerusalem; and other important news of the day.
By now we all know the story of how Kate Steinle was killed on
July 1, 2015, while lazily walking along a San Francisco pier with
her dad enjoying the hot summer day...and how a shot rang out seeing
Kate dropping to the ground, being cradled in her dad's arms with
her last words spoken, “help me dad.” Shot in the back by
what this jury deemed was an accidental shooting that was anything
but, the jury was charged with deciding whether Zarate intentionally
and willfully fired the single shot that killed Kate Steinle or
whether it was as the defense claimed 'unintentional'...a freak
accident...after Zarate found the gun wrapped in a cloth under his
seat at the pier, that it accidentally discharged with the bullet
ricocheting off of the concrete surface and into Steinle's back.
So while this scenario was deemed plausible to the
jury... plausible enough to find Zarate 'not guilty'...it might have
resulted in a vastly different verdict if the jury in Judge Samuel Feng’s
courtroom had been allowed to hear that the gun had been stolen just four
days before the killing from the parked car of a visiting Bureau of
Land Management ranger. And while even the prosecution agreed that
there was no evidence linking Zarate to that particular robbery,
sometimes no evidence is evidence in and of itself especially when
also kept from the jury was the fact that Zarate had been deported
five times before, and that in 2015 he was scheduled for a sixth
deportation having then been in federal custody for felony
're-entry.' 
And it was only after the 'not guilty' verdict had been reached
that an amended federal arrest warrant was reissued for Zarate...a
warrant stating that he did indeed violate his court mandated
supervised release on a previous federal sentence for illegally
re-entering our country now being coupled with his being a convicted
felon possessing the gun that killed Kate Steinle.
A true miscarriage of justice unseen since the OJ Simpson verdict
back in the '90's, this nightmare stems directly from San Francisco
being a sanctuary city in the now sanctuary state of California, and
with local sanctuary city laws stating that local law enforcement do
not have to hold an individual beyond the term of their
incarceration. And so San Francisco decided back in 2015 not to honor
any federal ICE detainer requests, that is unless a detainee is
proven to have had committed a violent or serious felony within the
past seven years...and this continues today.
“A day of vindication for the rest of immigrants,” so
said Zarate's defense attorney Francisco Ugarte yet this verdict is
anything but as the backlash against illegals and sanctuary
cities grows stronger by the day...and might we add rightfully so for
two simple truths are that Zarate was not supposed to be here and yet
he was, and that our existing immigration laws were passed to protect
American citizens not to protect illegal criminal aliens.
So what exactly are sanctuary cities...which is not a new concept
but has been around since Biblical times...besides being breeding
grounds for those wishing to do Americans harm while at the same time
being a place where criminals relish in raking in the benefits this
country has to offer. A federally funded safe haven, sanctuary cities
limit their cooperation with the federal government in order to help
illegals avoid deportation by ICE agents...and if truth be told also
to help increase the Democrats voting roster.
And while President Trump wants to pull said federal funding for
cities that refuse to comply with ICE deportation requests, many
sanctuary cities are fighting back against a cut in funding while
they await a federal court ruling against the legality of withholding
such funding. And to give you an idea of just how much funding these
cities would loose, know that in Fiscal Year 2016 alone Obama sent
$26.74 billion in federal
funding to America’s 106 sanctuary cities... funding they
desperately needed to feed, house, cloth, and educate those who came
to our country illegally...those who are criminals by their very act
of doing so. And know that during the entirety of the Obama years
illegal immigration cost we state taxpayers $89 billion with the feds
adding in another $46 billion, bringing the total to fund sanctuary
cities up to a whopping $135 billion...monies that should have been spent
on American citizens instead.
Thankfully, on January 25, 2017 President Trump signed Executive
Order 13768 directing the Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney
General Jeff Sessions to defund sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse
to comply with federal immigration law. So while at least 33 states
have considered enacting such laws to crack down on sanctuary cities,
Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Texas have already passed laws
that punish local governments that enact policies that protect and shelter
illegals
In fact, Indiana Rep. Todd Rokita recently introduced a bill that
could hold what he calls “lawless” state and local
politicians and officials accountable with criminal penalties if they
choose to obstruct federal immigration authority efforts. Specifically targeting sanctuary
cities, H.R. 4526...the Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians
(SLAP) Act...could see any and all violators facing up to five years of prison
time and a fine of up to $1 million for willfully ignoring the federal
government's requests for custody of undocumented individuals. It's a start...a very good start indeed.
And with other states and elected officials now planning to jump
on the anti-sanctuary city bandwagon, a war of words has started as
those in favor of sanctuary cities and the policies surrounding them
claim said cities are being made safer because they foster positive
relationships between illegals and law enforcement; that they are
legal and protected by the tenth amendment* (re: separation of
federal and state powers); and that said cities protect what they
call 'undocumented immigrants' from federal immigration laws.
Countering them are those who say sanctuary city policies allow
dangerous and violent illegal aliens the ability to roam free to
threaten the safety of both their communities and law-abiding
American citizens; that said cities defy federal laws by which state
and local governments are bound as per 8 U.S. Code § 1373**; and
that these cities prevent both local and state police officers from
doing their jobs.
In
the wake of the Kate Steinle murder verdict, while the liberals continue
to do everything possible to both harbor and protect those who
simply by setting foot in our country illegally are criminals. And in
sanctuary cities and in sanctuary states one thing is quite
conspicuous in its abject silence...liberal calls for gun control. And how
exactly does the liberal gun control agenda fit into all of this...simply it doesn’t. 
And
what of Nancy Pelosi, in whose backyard if not her front yard, this
murder took place?
Let’s
be clear here in that it wasn’t the gun that killed Kate Steinle,
it was in fact, the illegal alien who had already been deported five times, had a string of felonies attached to him, and was, not least
of all, living in a sanctuary city...her sanctuary city to be exact.
On
January 1, 2015, California’s AB 60 law went into
effect, and illegal aliens flooded DMV locations to take full
advantage, getting driver’s licenses. Couple that with yet another
California law, AB 1461, which is a motor-voter law that registers
holders of a California driver’s license to vote, and you have the
perfect liberal storm...illegal aliens with voter registration forms.
