The White House and the Obama administration spent the week passing the buck on the death of a 32-year-old San Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant who had a long criminal record and had already been deported five times.
Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez allegedly used a federal agent’s missing firearm to shoot and kill Kathryn Steinle, 32, as she was causally enjoying a walk with her father on a San Francisco pier.
Just the week before, President Obama mourned the death of nine parishioners with a passionate eulogy urging the nation into action on gun violence and race relations. What followed after Steinle’s death, in stark contrast, was finger-pointing from the White House that Republicans say was aimed more at insulating federal officials and the president from blame, and less at trying to correct the problems that led to her tragic and avoidable death.
Clearly, Sanchez should have been deported — and was several times — but fell through the massive bureaucratic cracks between a federal and state immigration policy that has become more lenient and flexible in recent years.
After a week of the federal-local blame game, it’s clear there’s not just one crack but many, including San Francisco’s decision to become a “sanctuary city” and ignore an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request to keep Sanchez detained after he served time on a separate charge. Other loopholes are ICE policies that require the agency to continue pursuing all criminal warrants against an illegal immigrant before deportation, and the Obama administration’s Priority Enforcement Program, which Republicans say is the driving force allowing illegal immigrants and even dangerous criminals like Sanchez to go free.
Asked repeatedly this week about Steinle’s death, the White House didn’t even lament its tragic implications before simply trying to deflect and refer reporters to DHS.
“Well, as it relates to this specific case, I’m just not going to be able to talk about the specific details of this matter,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, referring them to DHS.
By that time, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson had already started defending the administration’s November overhaul of its deportation program, known as the Priority Enforcement Program, or PEP. He told reporters that DHS was starting to work more effectively with state and local governments on deporting illegal immigrants after the new prioritized list of deportable aliens.
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of jurisdictions that have resisted that around the country, with the old program, so we put this new program in place, which I believe resolved the political and legal obstacles and objections that have been arising,” he said. Johnson added that the federal government was “headed in the direction” of more cooperation with local officials.
On Tuesday, a DHS official wasn’t so reluctant to nail San Francisco for Steinle’s murder. He laid the blame squarely on the San Francisco city sheriff’s office for failing to honor his agency’s request to keep Sanchez behind bars.
But the official, Philip Miller, a director at ICE, also said something more interesting under heavy questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Miller testified that that the federal government was trying to pursue an outstanding felony narcotic warrant against Sanchez before deporting him and that ICE has a policy of resolving all criminal warrants against an illegal immigrant before trying to send him back to his home country.
The answer seemed to only further infuriate Johnson.
“He was released in general society to create a murder – does that make any sense to you?” Johnson stormed.
Republicans and a handful of Democrats in Congress, and even presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have blamed the so-called sanctuary city policies for the murder and have called on San Francisco and other cities to start complying with federal deportation and detainer requests.
But other Republicans are targeting the Obama administration’s PEP as the real culprit. The White House and DHS says the policy is aimed at trying to allow immigration enforcement to focus on deporting unlawfully present criminals, rather than breaking up families of otherwise law-abiding immigrants who are living here illegally. Many Republicans say the program is sending a message of weak enforcement across the board to the states and local municipalities.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., is gathering Senate signatures for a letter to Johnson challenging the program.
“By defining its ‘priorities’ to exclude large categories of illegal immigrants, including those who have already been ordered deported or those who illegally reenter after having been deported, PEP ensures that countless more dangerous aliens will be released in U.S. communities – allowing otherwise entirely preventable crimes, including some of the most violent and egregious to occur,” he wrote.
The White House this week defended the president’s the new PEP program. It was designed, Earnest said, to “improve coordination and allow local jurisdictions to exercise more flexibility in working with the federal government on these issues.”
“And the president did that, undertook that change, with an eye toward making sure that we’re concentrating our limited federal law enforcement assets on deporting criminals, those who post a threat to the community, and those who pose a threat to national security,” he said.
Sessions argues that the program is having the opposite effect, allowing states and municipalities flexibility to flout federal immigration laws.
“Immigration is not supposed to be a game of Russian roulette where we release habitual immigration violators in U.S. communities and hope and pray they don’t go on to commit additional criminal offenses,” he said.
Susan Ferrechio and Pete Kasperowicz contributed to this story.
