Steinle shooting moves from talking point to trial
Alleged killed by undocumented immigrant ignited Trump frenzy over sanctuary policy
SAN FRANCISCO >> Two weeks after Donald Trump descended his gold-plated escalator and announced he was running for president, 32-year-old Kate Steinle was taking photos with her father on Pier 14 when she was shot and killed — allegedly by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had been deported five times.
A few months before the July 1, 2015, shooting, the Mexican national had been released from a San Francisco jail rather than deported because of the city’s “sanctuary” policy, which prevented officials from communicating with federal immigration authorities.
It took only a few days for Trump and many conservatives to seize on the San Francisco killing as a symbol of the dangers of illegal immigration and sanctuary policies.
Over the course of Trump’s improbable rise in the polls, the tragic case of “beautiful Kate” became a touchstone he returned to again and again.
Now, after more than two years of debate in the court of public opinion, the Steinle shooting is finally headed to a real court. Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, the immigrant accused of shooting her, will face trial for seconddegree murder later this month. Jury selection begins Monday, and opening statements are scheduled for next week.
The case is far from the simple black-and-white morality play as described by Trump, according to lawyers for the 54-year-old Garcia Zarate — who was previously referred to by his alias, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez. They’re planning to argue that the shooting was an accident and present forensic evidence that the bullet ricocheted before hitting Steinle — a contention endorsed by a ballistics expert at a 2015 preliminary hearing.
Political observers say it’s no coincidence that Steinle’s death coincided with Trump’s meteoric rise. For many voters, the Steinle shooting was the perfect illustration of Trump’s argument that illegal immigrants were “rapists and killers” who were “bringing crime” from Latin America.
Research has shown that both legal and illegal immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, but his strategy on focusing on Americans killed by illegal immigrants worked.
When he launched his campaign on June 16, 2015, Trump was treated like a joke and came in seventh place in an average of Republican primary polls. Less than a month later, however, he had risen to the top of the primary field — a position he never gave up.
“This topic is what brought him to the dance,” said Bill Whalen, a longtime GOP strategist who’s now a researcher at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “The shooting gave Trump a very vivid talking point in terms of focusing his constituents’ frustration on illegal immigration.”
Trump didn’t always get his facts right. He said at campaign rallies that Steinle was shot five times — she was actually shot once — and that Mexico “pushed” Garcia Zarate across the border before the shooting, something there’s no evidence of.
The shooting also became a cause célèbre at Fox News — especially for Bill O’Reilly, the former Fox host.
“Kate Steinle is collateral damage to the insane far-left politics that have long corrupted the City by the Bay,” O’Reilly told his viewers on July 6, 2015. “Dangerous people are walking around because of political correctness.”
Over the next few weeks, Fox News reporters chased down San Francisco officials at home and at events to ask them about the city’s sanctuary policy. One supervisor, Scott Wiener, walked away from a reporter, declaring that “Fox News is not real news.” (“What a pinhead,” O’Reilly responded on air.)
“The Steinle murder was definitely one of the factors in Trump’s rise,” said Wiener, who’s now a state senator. “It was a perfect storm: a horrific murder by a guy who shouldn’t have been here. … It happened in San Francisco — and Donald Trump absolutely poured lighter fluid all over it.”
Having O’Reilly — who this year was pushed out at Fox over sexual harassment allegations — revisit the shooting night after night helped reinforce Trump’s anti-immigrant message. “That in effect was free advertising for Donald Trump,” Whalen said.
It didn’t take long for the case to make it to the halls of Congress. One week after Steinle’s death, Matt Salmon, a Republican congressman from Arizona, declared that he was writing “Kate’s Law.” The bill, which Trump endorsed with a tweet, would increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who re-enter the U.S.
A version of Kate’s Law passed the House in 2015 before dying in the Senate. It passed the House again this summer, winning the support of two Bay Area Democrats, Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, and Eric Swalwell, D-Pleasanton. Swalwell knew Steinle’s brother growing up in the East Bay.
Advocates for undocumented immigrants strongly oppose the law. “It was a piece of legislation sitting on a shelf waiting for an opportunity,” said Matt Gonzalez, the chief attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and one of Garcia Zarate’s lawyers.
While members of Steinle’s family have backed Kate’s Law, they’ve also insisted that they don’t oppose the idea of sanctuary cities in general, and they’ve publicly objected to Kate’s memory being turned into a political football.
Besides the ricochet claim, the defense in the Steinle case is planning to focus on the fact that the gun used in the shooting was stolen out of a car of an agent of the federal Bureau of Land Management. Defense lawyers say the gun has a history of misfiring.
“It is without a doubt the BLM officer’s negligence started the chain of events that led to Kate Steinle’s death,” Gonzalez said.
The District Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
Garcia Zarate, who barely speaks English and has a second-grade education, has struggled to follow the case at times, Gonzalez said. “There’s a surreal quality of knowing that you’re the subject of this national debate,” he said. “He’s ready for the resolution.”
While the shooting spurred San Francisco supervisors
“The Steinle murder was definitely one of the factors in Trump’s rise. It was a perfect storm: a horrific murder by a guy who shouldn’t have been here. … It happened in San Francisco — and Donald Trump absolutely poured lighter fluid all over it..” — Scott Wiener, state senator
to limit their sanctuary ordinance, it didn’t do much to blunt the larger drive for sanctuary policies. Since Trump’s victory, the push to make California a “sanctuary state” has become a rallying cry of the resistance to the president. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill earlier this month that will limit how local officials can coordinate with immigration authorities, although it was watered down from a previous version.
Joe Guzzardi, a spokesman for Californians for Population Stabilization, a group that advocates for stricter limits on immigration, predicted that the Steinle trial is “going to bring back all of the unpleasant and horrible memories of that crime … just after Gov. Brown signed the sanctuary state bill.”
One thing to watch for over the next several weeks: Will Trump be tweeting about the trial? If he does, it could lead the judge to sequester the jurors or, theoretically, even lead to a mistrial.
“Let’s see if this lands on Donald Trump’s radar screen,” Whalen said. “The surefire way for Trump to churn the waters is with a tweet.”