Donald Trump Promises To Pass ‘Kate’s Law’

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s 10-point immigration plan, revealed in his immigration speech in Arizona on Wednesday evening, includes one of the issues that first propelled his campaign: the passage of a “Kate’s Law,” named for a young California woman who was killed at the hands of a five-times deported illegal alien.

On July 1 of last year, the illegal alien — who had also been convicted of seven felonies — shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle while she was walking at a San Francisco pier with her father.

Trump said in his immigration speech Wednesday:

Since 2013 alone, the Obama administration has allowed 300,000 criminal aliens to return back into United States communities. These are individuals encountered or identified by ICE, but who were not detained or processed for deportation because it wouldn’t have been politically correct.

My plan also includes cooperating closely with local jurisdictions to remove criminal aliens immediately. We will restore the highly successful Secure Communities Program. Good program. We will expand and revitalize the popular 287(g) partnerships, which will help to identify hundreds of thousands of deportable aliens in local jails that we don’t even know about. Both of these programs have been recklessly gutted by this administration. And those were programs that worked.

This is yet one more area where we are headed in a totally opposite direction. There’s no common sense, there’s no brain power in our administration by our leader, or our leaders. None, none, none.

On my first day in office, I am also going to ask Congress to pass ‘Kate’s Law’ – named for Kate Steinle – to ensure that criminal aliens convicted of illegal reentry receive strong mandatory minimum sentences. Strong. And then we get them out.

Another reform I am proposing is the passage of legislation named for Detective Michael Davis and Deputy Sheriff Danny Oliver, two law enforcement officers recently killed by a previously-deported illegal immigrant. The Davis-Oliver bill will enhance cooperation with state and local authorities to ensure that criminal immigrants and terrorists are swiftly, really swiftly identified and removed.

After years of being ignored in the media, family members whose relatives were killed by illegal aliens first received national attention after Steinle’s death, when Trump met with several family members in Los Angeles, California.

A Breitbart News analysis of when Trump’s campaign took off showed that he rocketed from seventh to first in the field of Republican presidential candidates within a week of bringing together this group of grieving Americans, whom he noted were victims of lax government policies.

Trump brought a host of these families on stage during his immigration speech Wednesday. That action essentially forced mainstream media outlets to cover the “angel parents,” from whom some networks had cut away during the prime time broadcast of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.

Less than two weeks after the death of Steinle, Kate’s parents were pushing for Kate’s Law, also titled the Establishing Mandatory Minimums for Illegal Reentry Act. Her father, Jim Steinle, said during an interview on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor that his family is apolitical and that they support Kate’s Law as a legacy to their daughter’s name.

He went on to say that while existing laws are there to protect Americans, “we feel that this particular set of circumstances, and the people involved, the different agencies let us down.” Mr. Steinle expressed a desire to be involved as lawmakers moved forward with crafting the language of Kate’s Law.

By late July 2015, several of of the bereaved families met with legislators in Washington, D.C. for a hearing on Kate’s Law. In an interview with Breitbart News, one of those legislators, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), noted the impact on deterrence that legislation such as Kate’s Law can have. Gohmert also remarked that illegal immigration could be taken care of “[i]f we just had an administration that enforced the law as it exists and that includes protecting the border, making sure that people don’t come in illegally,” and enforcing laws against visa overstays.

Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana