CommonDreams

While many of us are rightfully angry over Donald Trump’s treatment of the media, over the GOP’s attempt to gut health care for millions of Americans and over myriad other issues, two little-noticed but impactful bills sailed through the House of Representatives last week with barely a peep from progressive voices. The bills were the first immigration-related pieces of legislation taken up by the House since Trump’s inauguration and apply harsh penalties for undocumented people. They also help the president live up to some of his most xenophobic rhetoric and were passed with little or no debate, even receiving some Democratic support. They now head to the Senate, and unless there is a major public outcry, the bills could become law and fuel the hateful promises Trump made to the racist elements in his base.

Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, explained to me in an interview that “we saw the same sort of procedural shenanigans happening with the health care act.” She added that when it came to the immigration bills, there was hardly any outrage from either Democrats or the public. “These bills were introduced, and then they were rushed to the floor of the House, and so that stripped us of the opportunity to weigh in in a meaningful way,” she said.

One of the two bills is named Kate’s Law, after Kathryn Steinle, a young, telegenic, white American woman who was killed in San Francisco in 2015 after a bullet fired from a stolen gun ricocheted off the sidewalk and struck her in the back. The man accused of shooting the gun, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, happened to be undocumented—a factor that gave candidate Trump just the fodder he was looking for to target “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco and scapegoat immigrants as violent criminals. Yes, Lopez-Sanchez had been convicted of multiple felonies on narcotics-related charges (rather than violent crimes), but apparently it did not matter that the bullet that tragically ended Steinle’s life was an accidental ricochet off the sidewalk. According to The Los Angeles Times:

Lopez-Sanchez told KGO-TV that he found a gun wrapped in a T-shirt on the ground near a bench that evening and that it accidentally fired three times when he touched it. He said he kicked the gun off the pier and walked away, unaware anyone had been shot.

Had the fatal shot been fired by a citizen, there would have been no attempt to make a martyr of Steinle and politicize her death. Indeed, a judge dismissed Steinle’s parents’ suit against the city of San Francisco for being a “sanctuary city,” but allowed their case against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to go forward, given that the gun in question was left unsecured by a BLM federal officer in an unattended car. [MORE]