WASHINGTON -- House Republicans blasted President Barack Obama's administration Tuesday for failing to deport an illegal alien later charged with murder, and they advanced legislation aimed at deterring local communities from harboring aliens.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson disputed the criticism at a Judiciary Committee hearing but said he plans to evaluate whether a new approach is needed to avoid what happened in San Francisco, where a man with a long criminal record and no legal status was released and later arrested in a woman's death.
Johnson agreed with Republican critics who said it didn't make sense for the man to have been handed over to a jurisdiction like San Francisco, a "sanctuary city" that limits its cooperation with the federal government on immigration and was unlikely to try to send him home.
"I want to evaluate whether some discretion can be built into the process, so when we're faced with a choice like that, we can make the best decision for the purposes of public safety," Johnson told the House Judiciary Committee in his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the July 1 slaying of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle.
Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez of Mexico, who is accused of killing Steinle, had been serving a federal sentence for illegal re-entry into the U.S.
Instead of being deported upon finishing his prison term, he was handed over to San Francisco on a decades-old drug charge. San Francisco authorities ended up dismissing Lopez-Sanchez's case and releasing him, despite a request from federal officials to keep him detained.
Lopez-Sanchez is accused of later shooting Steinle as she walked along a popular pier with her father in broad daylight. He has pleaded innocent, claiming he found the gun on the pier and it accidentally went off.
San Francisco is among 300 communities nationwide that refuse to abide by federal immigration detention requests, or detainers. Such requests have been challenged successfully in court by critics who say they indiscriminately target foreigners, including many innocent of criminal wrongdoing.
Since Steinle's death, Republicans have called for making such detainers mandatory.
"A convicted criminal alien who had been deported numerous times killed an innocent American woman," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. He said the crime exposed "the tragic impact of [the Department of Homeland Security]'s reckless policies on the safety of Americans."
Johnson said the killing underscores the need for local authorities to cooperate with the federal government and its detention requests, but he said making such cooperation mandatory would be counterproductive.
Another GOP-controlled panel, the House Appropriations Committee, was taking action Tuesday aimed at depriving sanctuary cities of funding and requiring the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to continue to detain illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes, instead of exercising discretion to release them into the general population.
Both amendments were added by the panel's Republicans, over objections from Democrats, to a measure funding the Department of Homeland Security for the coming budget year.
"Dangerous criminals who are in the United States illegally must now be incarcerated until they are deported to their home country," said Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas.
Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., followed with an amendment to block sanctuary cities such as San Francisco from receiving millions of dollars in preparedness grants from the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats noted it would cut off the nation's largest cities from such grants, including New York and Chicago.
"This is such a broad, knee-jerk reaction," said Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., is pursuing similar legislation on sanctuary cities in the Senate. He had planned to offer it as an amendment to an education overhaul bill on the floor, but he announced Tuesday that he had backed off that plan after securing a commitment it would come to a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A Section on 07/15/2015