As the district attorney for San Francisco, Kamala Harris ran a city program that kept criminal illegal immigrants out of prison by training them for jobs they could not legally have.
Harris, who served as San Francisco district attorney from from 2004 to 2011, lead an initiative called “Back on Track” while serving as the city’s top prosecutor, according to a 2009 article from the LA Times. The program was intended to help felons get their convictions expunged, but Harris at the time said she didn’t know illegal immigrants were also being selected by her office.
Harris was made aware of the loophole only after an attack on a San Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant, according to the LA Times.
Amanda Kiefer was walking to dinner through San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood in July 2008 when an illegal migrant allegedly snatched her purse and ran off into an SUV, according to the LA Times. That man — later identified as Alexander Izaguirre — and the driver of the vehicle attempted to run her down, and after she jumped on the vehicle to avoid being run over, the driver slammed on the breaks, launching her onto the pavement, resulting in a fractured skull and blood oozing from her ear
Izaguirre had pleaded guilty to a drug felony months earlier for selling cocaine, but he had avoided prison when he was selected to participate in the Back on Track program, an initiative created by Harris when she was the city’s top prosecutor, according to the LA Times. However, Izaguirre was also discovered to be living in the country illegally — drawing into question as to why he would’ve been selected for the program when he wasn’t allowed to work in the U.S. anyways.
Harris told the LA Times allowing illegal immigrants into the program was a “flaw in the design.”
“I believe we fixed it,” she said at the time. “So moving forward, it is about making sure that no one enters Back on Track if they cannot hold legal employment.”
“The whole point of the program,” Harris told the outlet, “is that these people would be able to obtain and hold down lawful employment, and if they’re undocumented, they probably would not be able to do that, so it would go against the very spirit of the program” to continue enrolling them.
It’s not known exactly how many illegal migrants were selected into the program, according to the LA Times, and Harris said she never asked how many were enrolled. The San Francisco chapter of Goodwill Industries International handled oversight of the participants, and supervisor Carlos Serrano-Quan estimated fewer than a dozen illegal immigrants had been enrolled.
Illegal immigrants who had started the program were permitted to complete it, and Harris claimed it was not local law enforcement’s role to enforce federal immigration law, the LA Times reported.
Beyond her years as San Francisco Attorney General, Harris boasts a long history of opposing federal immigration enforcement.
As a U.S. senator, she earned an F- rating by NumbersUSA for her opposition to border enforcement and other amnesty measures, compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Ku Klux Klan during a Senate confirmation hearing and suggested the agency should be rebuilt “from scratch” during a June 2018 media interview.
Harris was among the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates who raised their hands when asked if they supported the decriminalization of unlawful border crossings. As Vice President, Harris was appointed to lead the Biden administration’s efforts to address the root causes of illegal migration from Central America, but went on to oversee more than seven million illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border during her tenure, the latest Customs and Border Protection data show.
Harris has since become the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek re-election.
Harris’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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