A second victory this week for supporters of “sanctuary cities,” where municipal policies partition local law enforcement from federal immigration officials, comes from San Francisco. The city council members voted unanimously to affirm the city’s 1989 policing policies . Council members resisted a local and national outcry following the death of Kate Steinle, a California resident who suffered a gun wound and died while walking in a San Francisco tourist area in July.
Steinle was allegedly shot by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican immigrant who was in the U.S. illegally, and eligible for priority deportation due to his lengthy criminal record. He later claimed that he stumbled upon the gun, which had been stolen day before, and that it accidentally went off.
The Senate moved this week to force cities like San Francisco to repeal their policies, and give unfettered access to federal law enforcement. The measure was shot down by Democrats in a procedural vote, citing safety concerns that inspire decoupling policies in the first place.
Local cops often want immigrants to trust them, and don’t want to incur civil rights lawsuits executing immigration policies that they aren’t trained to enforce.
"You have a federal government that is essentially trying to get cities like San Francisco to become agents of immigration," City supervisor David Campos told Bay Area ABC Action 7 News .
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly had acted as a booster for one part of the bill, Kate’s Law, which would have condemned repeat immigration lawbreakers like Lopez-Sanchez to a five-year minimum prison sentence.
“When a 32-year-old woman can be gunned down by an illegal felon who had been deported five times, and you can’t get a strict law punishing illegal alien felons passed. When that happens, you don’t have a functioning government,” O’Reilly said.
The talk show host also criticized Republicans for bundling Kate’s Law with the sanctuary city punishments, saying that the lawmakers knew that it would sink the bill.
Yet it is unclear if Kate’s Law would have made it through a vote alone either. The measure was opposed by some Republicans, such as Jeff Flake (Arizona) and Mike Lee (Utah), who have argued against minimum sentencing requirements in general .
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