Real estate mogul and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump hammered Sen. Marco Rubio’s immigration policies on Twitter Tuesday, dismissing the Florida senator as a flip-flopper.
Trump’s comments come on the heels of the brutal and entirely preventable shooting death of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco at the hands of a Mexican illegal named Juan-Francisco Lopez Sanchez. Sanchez had been deported five times and had seven prior felony convictions. San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy welcomed Sanchez despite his illegal status and criminal history — he admitted to law enforcement he chose to sneak into the city because he knew he would not be deported.
On an appearance on Cavuto: Coast to Coast, Rubio said Trump’s blunt comments about the havoc that mass illegal Mexican immigration is wreaking on the country is… a “distraction” from the problem of illegal immigration.
“Well, first of all, what happened in San Francisco’s a horrible tragedy, and our heart goes out to that family,” Rubio said. “Irrespective, at the beginning from who did it, it’s just a terrible tragedy, and our heart breaks for that family. That individual, that criminal responsible for that act, had been deported on four separate occasions, and each time snuck back in.”
Rubio then claimed his Gang of Eight bill would have stopped criminals like Sanchez from entering the country: “[I]t is absolutely true that we have a border and illegal immigration issue that is very serious. I’ve talked about that repeatedly, I have tried to pass bills to address it, I will continue to work to try to address it.”
“All of these people that don’t want to have a debate about illegal immigration,” he continued. They want to focus on Trump’s comments about, you know, Mexicans as opposed to being focused on the real issue here.”
Yet Rubio’s bill would have showered cash on sanctuary cities harboring dangerous illegals such as Sanchez — and more importantly, thanks to an amendment attached to the bill by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, would have made it impossible for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to strip funds from cities who defy them and release illegal aliens back onto the streets, where they can commit more crimes against Americans. Thanks in part to deadly “sanctuary city” policies, 347,000 convicted criminal immigrants remain at large in the U.S. — and illegal immigrants accounted for 37 percent of all federal sentences handed down in 2014.
“The bill would have made it much harder for ICE to detain even criminal alien felons, meaning that most would simply disappear into the wind if arrested, and settle in different locations, especially sanctuary cities, as Sanchez said was his intention,” as Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News. Law enforcement officials fiercely denounced the bill, with ICE Council President Chris Krane saying it was written as if “explicitly written to handcuff law enforcement officers.”
Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.
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