San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos, the leading advocate for expanding San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies, attacked Donald Trump in explaining his newest resolution to a Board of Supervisors meeting last Tuesday.
Last year, San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy, which effectively protects criminals from deportation by barring local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, was the focus of negative press nationwide after a young woman, Kate Steinle, was shot by an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported five times and convicted seven times.
Supervisor Avalos used a speech on Tuesday to argue that San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy should actually be expanded to make it even more difficult for local law enforcement to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials when they have detained an illegal alien.
Avalos paid lip service to Steinle’s death, and then immediately pivoted to attack presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and attempt to spread the blame.
Avalos said:
That was a very tragic incident. Ms. Steinle was a very sympathetic person to a lot of people, and that led to people having a very passionate interest in whoever was responsible being held accountable. Except the level of responsibility seemed to be spread across many, many people, such as what can happen when an event gets very, very politicized.
At the presidential level, where people are running for President of the United States, we saw Donald Trump, who is putting forward a campaign based on hatred and xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria, that that had an impact on undermining what we had put forward as the standards of our sanctuary city policy.
Avalos tried to shift blame for Steinle’s death to everything except the illegal alien felon who shot her, and the policy that drew him to, and kept him in, San Francisco.
Avalos blamed the police, too, for the gun used in the murder:
Immediately after the tragic death of Kate Steinle, people were questioning why we had a sanctuary city policy and were blaming our sanctuary city policy for her death, even though there were other factors that contributed to that, including how a law enforcement officer’s gun got onto the pier, where it appears to be accidentally shot off by an immigrant man, who is blamed as well for her death.
The attacks on Trump continued. After Breitbart News lead investigative journalist Lee Stranahan was unlawfully ejected, Avalos followed with a pun that attacked Trump’s opposition to illegal immigration — casting Trump’s policy as an attack on all immigrants:
We have to stand up and be courageous in this time when the fear of immigrants is so strong and it’s being trumped up in our presidential election.
Avalos’s call to “stand up and be courageous” came after Stranahan was removed from the meeting, purportedly because he was hurting the feeling of illegal alien protesters by recording the meeting, which is permissible under the First Amendment and the Brown Act.
The people applauding in that video are all breaking the rules of the Board of Supervisors @stranahan
— Lee Stranahan (@stranahan) May 11, 2016
Stranahan was unlawfully thrown out of a Board of Supervisors’ meeting for filming radical pro-amnesty protestors disrupting the discussion and breaking the rules repeatedly without repercussion.
As Avalos later wrote in an email obtained by Breitbart News, his justification of the removal was less than courageous:
The reporter was video taping people in the audience and they felt intimidated by him doing so. Some of them were undocumented immigrants and they thought he knew that so they believed that he was harassing them.
After the incident, Avalos continued to attack Stranahan with the same accusations of racism that he’d used against Trump.
The next vote on expanding San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy will be held on May 24.
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