Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) spoke at the Remembering Our Children Luncheon of the Remembrance Project Thursday in a prelude to the group’s second annual conference in Washington, DC.
Former White House Chief Strategist and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon will headline Saturday’s event.
Thursday’s luncheon was dedicated to children killed because the government did not keep illegal aliens out of their communities, and was host to several so-called “angel families” – those who have lost a loved-one to illegal alien crime – who told their stories of victimization in a system that endlessly plays up the misfortune of those breaking America’s immigration law over that of American citizens.
Kobach, who headlined the luncheon’s lineup of speakers, is running for governor of Kansas on a long history of fighting against illegal immigration. The Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law graduate personally authored some of the nation’s toughest immigration laws, including Arizona’s landmark SB1070. Kobach currently serves as vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
After an introduction by Remembrance Project National Director Maria Espinoza, Kobach told the audience, “These are crimes that are preventable. If our immigration laws had been enforced, the crimes would not have happened.”
Kobach mocked the oft-repeated mantra of what he termed the “open-borders left” that “immigrants” commit less crime than native-born Americans. Two factors, according to him, rendered this argument “flimsy.” First, the difficulty of calculating crime rates of a largely unknown population. Kobach noted that, “The Census Bureau, when determining the immigration status of prisoners, acknowledges they guess 53 percent of the time.”
“The second problem, the bigger problem, is they conflate legal and illegal immigration,” Kobach continued. “It wouldn’t be particularly suprising to find that legal aliens have a lower crime rate … most of them, before they get their visas, have to pass a criminal background check.”
Kobach then explained:
The illegal alien population is a totally different story … in that group, criminality is off the charts. And one of the reasons he can’t tell exact what [their crime rate] is, is that we don’t know what the denominator is … To project or estimate a crime rate, you have to know the population, but we don’t know the number of illegal aliens in the United States.
We estimate crime rates by looking at criminal convictions. Well, illegal aliens are often taken of the prosecution track and put on the removal track.”
The Kansas Secretary of State also addressed the fight against sanctuary cities and his work to quantify and combat non-citizen voting.
Before Kobach spoke, Rep. King, a long-time supporter of the Remembrance Project and a leading congressional immigration hawk, addressed the luncheon. King was introduced by Espinoza as a “stalwart” in the fight against illegal immigration.
King explained his frustration at House Immigration Subcommittee hearings where so-called experts would focus all their analysis and findings on the plight of illegal aliens breaking American immigration law and ignore that of American citizens:
Every hearing … someone would testify on how many people died in the Arizona desert trying to get across the desert and into the interior of the United States. It seemed to me there was something that was really missing … I began to ask these witnesses … how many American died at the hands of those that did make it across the desert?
“No witness could answer that question. No one knew the answer,” King went on about one particular hearing shortly after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, recalling one witness, former INS agent Mike Cutler, who said, “I don’t know how many, but I can tell you it is in multiples of the victims of September 11th.”
Other leading lights of advocacy for the victims of illegal immigration are expected to attend Saturday’s conference, including former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), acting director of President Trump’s newly unveiled VOICE office Barbara Gonzalez, once-and-future Paul Ryan challenger Paul Nehlen of Wisconsin, and Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. Bannon’s headline speech is scheduled for midday.
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