Following Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democrat ticket, her glaring failures on the border crisis as President Biden’s “border czar” have been thrust back into the spotlight. But the vice president’s record of radicalism on immigration extends far beyond the White House and back to her early days as San Francisco District Attorney.
Harris was San Francisco’s top cop from 2004 to 2011, and then California Attorney General from 2011 to 2017 before moving to the Senate. During that time, she developed a reputation for soft-on-crime policies – particularly when it came to enforcing federal immigration laws.
Harris was notably an avid proponent of so-called “sanctuary cities.” She once described San Francisco as “a sanctuary city, a city of refuge,” further claiming that “we always will be.”
A sanctuary city, broadly speaking, is a municipality whose political leaders openly refuse to comply with federal immigration laws and authorities. In practice, this can amount to anything from denying federal authorities access to crime statistics and data to refusing to deport illegal immigrants and, in some cases, even refusing to prosecute illegal immigrants found guilty of “low-level” crimes.
Harris has asserted throughout her career that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” San Francisco, under her prosecutorial leadership, consistently refused to refer illegal immigrants accused of crimes to federal authorities specifically to protect them from deportation.
In so doing, Harris hobbled the federal government’s ability to identify and track known criminals, gang leaders, murderers, rapists, and cartel members hiding in the United States. Immigration and Customs Enforcement maintains lists of known criminals who have escaped justice in Central and South America by fleeing north. By failing to relay this information to authorities, Harris ensured that it would be significantly more difficult to identify these criminals and bring them to justice.
A recent New York Post expose detailed just a few of the horrific acts committed by violent criminals who benefitted from Harris’s policies as San Francisco DA. One of the most notorious was Edwin Ramos, an illegal alien from El Salvador who committed a grisly triple murder in 2008.
Before killing three people, Ramos had been arrested multiple times for gang-related assaults. But Harris’s policy of not questioning the immigration status of juveniles meant he was never reported to federal immigration authorities. In the national outrage that followed the story, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom changed that policy.
Notably, however, Harris still refused to seek the death penalty against Ramos.
Harris’s policies also allowed Rony Aguilera, an illegal alien from Honduras, to walk free after being found guilty of assault. A year later, Aguilera was involved in a gruesome gang murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Harris also allowed illegal aliens convicted of drug crimes to enter San Francisco’s “Back on Track” program, which provided job training and expunged criminal records. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in 2008 DA Harris knowingly let roughly half a dozen illegal immigrants charged as first-time drug offenders “clear their records by going through a jobs training program.”
Harris defended this at the time by claiming that these individuals were unaware that they were illegal when they entered the program, and so it would be unfair to not allow them to participate or to report them to federal authorities. However, she still “let several graduates go free even after learning of their status.” When questioned why, she stated, “Enforcing federal immigration law is not the job of local authorities.”
One of the program’s participants was Alexander Izaguirre, an illegal immigrant from Honduras. While he was in the program, Izaguirre robbed San Francisco resident Amanda Kiefer by stealing her purse. He then jumped into his car and tried to kill Kiefer by running her down. Though she survived, she suffered significant trauma, including a skull fracture. When told of the incident, Harris dismissed it as a “huge kind of pimple” on an otherwise supposedly good program.
With four months to go until Election Day, these could be just the start of the shocking revelations about Harris’s radical tenure in California. Last week, America First Legal announced seven separate investigations into Harris’s record as attorney general. Most notably, they plan to investigate her “failure to enforce federal immigration laws,” which could become a major problem for Harris’s nascent presidential campaign as voters continue to rank the border crisis among their top concerns.
Harris’s DA record is littered with instances of her picking and choosing which laws to enforce. By refusing to work with federal authorities on tracking illegal aliens, she knowingly made San Francisco less safe. Should she win in November, Americans can only expect more of the chaos and tragedy they’ve already seen over the past four years.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
