Vice President Kamala Harris is touting her time as a prosecutor in her 2024 run, with her campaign saying she has never “shied away from taking on those who harm the American people.”
But as district attorney of San Francisco, Harris ran a program that allowed illegal immigrants arrested for drug crimes to get job training and have their records expunged — all while avoiding deportation because of the city’s sanctuary policies.
Harris touted “Back on Track,” even though one of the offenders she picked for the program — illegal Honduran migrant Alexander Izaguirre — allegedly brutally assaulted a young woman, leaving her with a skull fracture and longterm trauma.
Harris later referred to the attack as, “a huge kind of pimple on the face of this program.”
The DA’s office chose Izaguirre for the program after he was arrested twice in eight months for allegedly snatching a purse and for selling cocaine, the LA Times reported at the time.
In July 2008, while in the “Back on Track” program, Izaguirre committed another crime. According to authorities, he stole the purse of Amanda Kiefer, a San Francisco resident who had been walking with her friend to a restaurant in the Pacific Heights area.
After taking her purse, Izaguirre got into an SUV and attempted to run her down, authorities said. Kiefer got onto the hood of the car and hit the brakes, throwing the 29-year-old into the road and fracturing her skull.
Kiefer told the LA Times in 2009 that the attack led her to flee California for good, and that she didn’t understand why illegal criminals were not being deported.
When Kiefer’s story came to light, while Harris was running for state Attorney General, she expressed regret that illegal immigrants had been allowed into her 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 LA Times. She then walked back her metaphor, saying, “I don’t mean to trivialize it, nor do I mean to cover it up.”
She said she supported Izaguirre being deported after the assault, and the program was changed to require participants to have documents showing they can legally work.
But she let the remaining illegal immigrants in “Back on Track” complete the program.
“My issue was more, what are we going to do to prevent this from happening in the future?” she said at the time, per the LA Times.
Harris’ record in San Francisco was also tainted with her strong support of sanctuary city policies.
In 2006, her spokesperson said “we are a sanctuary city, a city of refuge, and we always will be.”
Under sanctuary city policies, local authorities were not allowed to question one’s immigration status unless they committed a crime. But the policy was loosely interpreted by several city departments, leading many violent criminals to be released back on the streets.
In June of 2008, Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador with a criminal record, killed a father and two sons in a triple murder. He shot Tony Bologna, 48, and his two sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16, for no apparent reason at a traffic stop. Prosecutors would later argue Ramos likely mistook them for gang members.
Ramos had a history of criminal behavior as a juvenile. He was involved in a gang-related assault on a bus passenger and an attempted robbery of a pregnant woman, per the San Francisco Chronicle. In both criminal cases, the juvenile probation department did not involve federal immigration authorities, because it was city policy not to question legal status.
in San Francisco, Calif. KPIX
He was set free again in March of 2008 — just months before the Bologna killings — after being caught by police in a tinted car window with no license plate, sitting next to another gang member who had attempted to discard a gun used in a double killing. Police said they wouldn’t file charges because they couldn’t prove Ramos knew about the gun, the Chronicle reported.
Danielle Bologna, the widow and mother of the Bologna family, sued the city in 2009, claiming that the light interpretation of the sanctuary city policies in San Francisco led to the murder of her family. A judge threw out the lawsuit on argument that the city officials were not responsible for what Ramos did, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Danielle Bologna pleaded with Harris at the time to seek the death penalty for Ramos.
“The district attorney really needs to pay attention – she doesn’t have kids, she doesn’t know what this means,” the mother said of Harris, the Chronicle reported in 2008.
Harris did not seek the death penalty for Ramos and instead advocated for life sentence without parole, keeping in line with her anti-death penalty campaign promise.
Harris’ campaign did not respond to an inquiry from The Post.
