Sanctuary City Virtue Signalers Complicit In Steinle, Riley Murders
In her interview with CNN anchor Erin Burnett, U.S. Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) said that the murder of 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley by Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, “shouldn’t shape our overall immigration policy.” Porter, a long-shot Senate candidate to replace retiring fellow Democrat Laphonza Butler, said that instead of enacting real border security and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to apprehend violent illegal immigrants, Congress should work harder to keep its “promise to Dreamers.” Since 2023, Porter has consistently cast votes against strengthening border and interior enforcement.
The “one instance” claim that Porter made is 100 percent wrong and offends the hundreds of illegal aliens’ victims’ families. The website Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime lists dozens of preventable tragedies.
The most highly publicized illegal-alien-murders-citizen heartbreak occurred in 2015, four years before Porter was elected to the House. Porter lived in Southern California where she was certainly aware of the circumstances surrounding Steinle’s murder in sanctuary city San Francisco. The perpetrator was José Inez García Zárate, a five-time deported illegal alien and a Mexican national who had seven felony convictions. Prosecutors later learned that García Zárate had stolen the murder weapon, a .40-caliber SIG Sauer P239 handgun, from a Bureau of Land Management ranger’s personal vehicle.
Two years after Steinle’s murder, and after five days of deliberations, a jury acquitted García Zárate of all murder and manslaughter charges but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm. García Zárate was sentenced to time served for previous crimes, a total of seven years. When the Steinle family announced its intention to file a lawsuit against the City of San Francisco, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Bureau of Land Management, alleging complicity and negligence in their daughter’s death, Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero dismissed the family’s claims against the city and then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. In January 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the magistrate’s ruling that Kate’s family could not sue San Francisco. Despite his obvious crimes, immigration-related and otherwise, illegal alien García Zárate got off easy — no justice for Kate, however.
Because immigration is voters’ top issue, the publicity around Riley’s murder may soon reach or exceed the coverage given to Steinle’s case. Similarities abound. Like García Zárate, Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan national, was in the U.S. illegally. Ibarra entered the U.S. illegally through the Southwest border. According to a recently filed arrest affidavit, Ibarra “disfigured Riley’s skull,” and is charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, and hindering a 911 call.
ICE records document that Ibarra was detained on September 8, 2022, after illegally crossing the U.S. from Mexico near El Paso, Texas, before being released. ICE also said Ibarra was arrested on August 31, 2023, in New York and charged with acting in a manner injurious to a child less than 17 but was released because of New York’s sanctuary policy. Biden’s catch-and-release agenda paroled Ibarra into the U.S. interior. Parole is an immigration status that includes work permission and makes alien removal more difficult.
The common denominator in Steinle’s and Riley’s cases is that their murders took place in sanctuary cities which protect violent criminals who too frequently prey on innocent citizens. When Steinle was killed, President Barack Obama was in the White House. Obama’s administration made it clear that it would not act against sanctuary jurisdictions. Instead, Obama moved to convert the entire nation into a sanctuary by giving work permits to illegal aliens and drastically scaling back enforcement for all but the most egregious criminal offenders. Obama terminated what was perhaps the most effective enforcement program ever, Secure Communities, the information sharing program between the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to identify in-custody aliens. The former president replaced an efficient program with the Priority Enforcement Program that explicitly allowed localities to obstruct ICE.
Although Athens officials insist that it isn’t a sanctuary city, during a 2020 interview, then-Athens-Clarke County Sheriff candidate John Williams, since elected, explicitly said he had no interest in cooperating with ICE officials.
Williams said: “It is not my intention to cooperate with detainers [from ICE]. I see it as the sheriff’s responsibility to protect the community. We can’t help with a culture of fear in our community and expect our community to respond and help us in situations.” Deborah Gonzalez, Athens’ district attorney urged abolishing ICE. Gonzales said that her charging decisions would “take into account collateral consequences to undocumented immigrants.” Gonzalez’s statements raised serious questions about her ability to prosecute Ibarra and she has brought in a special prosecutor to handle the case.
Federal, state and local governments failed Riley, Steinle and hundreds before them. Misguided virtue signaling has laid the foundation for protecting instead of deporting criminals. Gonzalez and Williams got their wish — Biden’s non-enforcement policies effectively abolished ICE. For now, he best Laken’s family can hope for is a token, insincere, Biden phone call, which, several days after her murder, has not been placed. Come to think of it, Obama never called the Steinle family either. Biden’s and Obama’s callous dismissal of Riley’s and Steinle’s murders are the ultimate betrayal of innocent Americans that prove their favoritism toward illegal alien criminals.
Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifssp.org.
Sanctuary City Virtue Signalers Complicit In Steinle, Riley Murders
