(Headline USA) As San Francisco’s district attorney, Kamala Harris ran a program that helped illegal immigrants arrested for drug crimes avoid deportation, get jobs, and even have their records expunged.
The “Back on Track” program was run by the San Francisco district attorney’s office while Harris was district attorney from 2004 to 2011. At the time, Harris claimed she didn’t know illegal immigrants were being selected by her office to be a part of the program.
Harris claimed she learned of the loophole only after an illegal immigrant in the program attacked a San Francisco woman.
The illegal was Alexander Izaguirre, a Honduran who allegedly assaulted a young woman and left her with a skull fracture. He was chosen for the “Back on Track” program after he was arrested twice in eight months—once for stealing a woman’s purse and a second time for selling cocaine.
In 2008, while in the “Back on Track” program, Izaguirre committed another crime and stole the purse of Amanda Kiefer, a resident who had been walking to a restaurant with a friend. After stealing her purse, Izaguirre got into a SUV and ran her down, fracturing her skull.
When Kiefer’s story came to light, Harris insisted she wasn’t aware of Izaguirre’s admission into the program.
“The immigration issue, as it relates to the Izaguirre case, obviously is a huge kind of pimple on the face of this program,” Harris told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “I don’t mean to trivialize it, nor do I mean to cover it up. My issue was more, what are we going to do to prevent this from happening in the future?”
Harris supported Izaguirre being deported after the assault and agreed to change the program to require participants to be legal U.S. residents.
“The whole point of the program is that these people would be able to obtain and hold down lawful employment, and if they’re undocumented, they probably would not be able to do that, so it would go against the very spirit of the program,” Harris told the outlet.
However, she let the remainder of illegal immigrants in “Back on Track” complete the program and continued to support San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies.
