In Support of Kate’s Law

Kate’s Law, HR3004, is very personal to the people in my district because of two other names.

On October 24, 2014, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Danny Oliver and Placer County Detective Michael Davis were brutally gunned down in one of the most cold-blooded rampages in the history of either county.

Deputy Oliver approached a car in a parking lot to ask if he could help a couple who appeared to be lost. He was shot dead.

A bystander who was too slow in turning over his car keys became the next victim. Miraculously, he survived a gunshot to the head – but vividly remembers the smile on the gunman’s face as he pulled the trigger.

The next victim was Detective Michael Davis. His father, a Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy had lost his life in the line of duty on the very same day 26 years earlier.

These crimes should never have happened. Their assailant had repeatedly entered this country illegally. While here, he had been apprehended for committing other crimes and repeatedly deported, only to easily re-cross the border without being challenged.

I have heard it said that there’s no evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at rates any higher than the general population.

That’s because crime statistics don’t aggregate by legal status anymore. Some states like California no longer even report the legal status of inmates. They can tell us by race, gender, age, background and jurisdiction who stole a car last year; but they won’t tell us how many illegal immigrants did.

But by painstakingly piecing together all the available fragmented data in 2015, Fox News concluded that illegal immigrants are three times more likely to be convicted of murder than the legal population.

According to this report, illegals account for 3.5 percent of the population, but are convicted of 13.6 percent of all crimes, including 12 percent of all murders, 20 percent of all kidnappings, and 16 percent of drug trafficking. Citing the GAO, Fox reported that 55,000 illegal immigrants were in federal prison and 296,000 in state and local jails in 2011.

And the real tragedy is that there should be zero crimes committed by illegal immigrants because there should be zero illegal immigrants in this country.

For sixteen years, two Presidents – one Republican and one Democrat –ignored their constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Finally, we have a president who takes that responsibility seriously.

This rule brings a bill to the floor that increases penalties for those who return to our country AFTER they’ve been deported. The other to be debated today adds long overdue sanctions to local jurisdictions that refuse to protect their own citizens and I rise in strong support of that bill as well.

Too late for officers Davis and Oliver; too late for Kate Steinle; too late for thousands of other Americans killed by illegal immigrants – but perhaps just in time for your neighbor, your family member, or even yourself.