The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Immigration anger builds after San Francisco verdict
President calls acquittal ‘complete travesty of justice.’
The attacks on San Francisco and other cities with similar immigration policies began moments after a jury acquitted a Mexican man charged with killing a woman on a popular pier. President Donald Trump called the verdict a “complete travesty of justice,” and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanded cities like San Francisco scrap immigration policies barring cooperation with federal deportation efforts. Thousands of Twitter users turned to the hash tag# Boycott San Francisco. Conservative politicians and celebrities such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and actor James Woods lambasted the city. City officials pushed back and vowed to stand behind their so-called sanctuary city policy. It’s what led Garcia Zarate to be released from San Francisco’s jail despite a federal request to detain himfor deportation several weeks before Kate Steinle was fatally shot in the back in 2015. He had been deported five times before. “San Francisco is and always will be a sanctuary city,” said Ellen Canale, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ed Lee. It was among the first U.S. cities to establish a sanctuary law in 1989 as part of a national wave of cities adopting policies to help Central American refugees. Since then, San Francisco has consistently been an early adopter of some of the most immigrant-friendly policies nationwide, expanding protections to residents liv- ing in the country without documentation. Hundreds of cities have similar policies, which Trump, Sessions and others blame for Steinle’s death. Prosecutors had charged Garcia Zarate with murder, assault and being felon in possession of a firearm. He called the shooting an accident. He said he found a gun under a chair on the pier and it fired when he picked it up. San Francisco Deputy District Attorney Diana Garcia urged jurors to convict him of first-degree murder. Jurors also considered and rejected second-degree murder and involuntary man slaughter. They did convict him of the firearm charge, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in jail. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it would “ultimately remove” Garcia Zarate from the country. Before the shooting, he had finished a federal prison sentence for illegal re-entry into the United States and had been transferred to San Francisco’s jail in March 2015 to face a 20-year-old charge for selling marijuana. The sheriff ’s department released him a few days after prosecutors dropped the marijuana charge, despite a request from federal officials to detain him for deportation. “San Francisco’s decision to protect criminal aliens led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle,” Sessions said in a statement Thursday night. “I urge the leaders of the nation’s communities to reflect on the outcome of this case and consider carefully the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to cooperate with federal law enforcement officers.” At the time of the shooting, then candidate Trump and others pointed to Steinle’s death as reasons why the country’s immigration laws should be tightened. And Friday on social media, Trump said, “The Kate Steinle killer cameback and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court.”