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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on June 19, 2026, aboard the Silversea Silver Dawn, during a Hillsdale educational cruise through the fjords of Norway.
On July 1, 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn “Kate” Steinle was killed while sightseeing in San Francisco with her father and a family friend. According to federal prosecutors, Steinle was walking on Pier 14, a popular tourist attraction in San Francisco’s Embarcadero area, when she was shot in the back by Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate, an illegal immigrant from Mexico with a lengthy criminal record.
It wasn’t Garcia-Zarate’s first illegal trip into the U.S. Federal immigration records show that he had been deported six times prior to Steinle’s killing: in 1994, 1997, twice in 1998, 2006, and 2009. And he had been arrested by San Francisco police in March 2015, four months before the murder, for an outstanding drug possession warrant.
Following his arrest, U.S. immigration officials lodged an immigration detainer on Garcia-Zarate—in other words, they requested that the police hold him for an additional 48 hours to allow them time to assume custody and deport him. Instead, San Francisco’s prosecutor, George Gascón, dropped the drug charges and the San Francisco police, as a matter of policy, disregarded the federal immigration detainer and released Garcia-Zarate on April 15. Less than three months later, Kate Steinle was dead.
Although it seems impossible, the story gets worse. Garcia-Zarate claimed that he had accidentally picked up and fired the pistol that killed Steinle, and a San Francisco jury found him innocent of murder. He was convicted on a minor charge of illegal possession of a firearm, but not even that held up. In 2019, a California appeals court tossed the conviction on the grounds that if Garcia-Zarate had only held the gun for a little while—even if it was just barely long enough to shoot and kill an innocent woman—the jury should have been given the option to acquit him on the grounds that he didn’t technically possess it. In the end, Garcia-Zarate was simply deported in 2024—three decades after his first of seven illegal incursions into the U.S. and nearly nine years after he killed Kate Steinle.
Such is life, death, and injustice in a so-called sanctuary city like San Francisco and a sanctuary state like California. How could this happen? How could a foreign national repeatedly enter our country, violate our laws, kill one of our fellow citizens, and never be held accountable? To answer this question, you have to understand the nature of the sanctuary movement in America and the threat it poses to the safety and security of Americans and to the rule of law.
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Sean Davis is co-founder and CEO of The Federalist. He received a B.B.A. from Texas Tech University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously served as the chief financial officer of The Daily Caller, the chief operating officer of Media Trackers, an economic policy adviser for former Texas Governor Rick Perry, and the chief investigator for former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.