Immigration uproar looms over trial in Kate Steinle’s death

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Kate Steinle’s shooting death on a San Francisco pier in July 2015 by a man who had been deported multiple times escalated quickly from a crime to the subject of a nationwide furor over illegal immigration.

Donald Trump used Steinle’s death to fuel his campaign for president, branding her killer, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an “animal” and declaring that the shooting showed the need for a wall on the Mexican border.

In San Francisco, anger at Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi for his decision to release the jailed Garcia Zarate about 10 weeks before the shooting contributed to his 2016 re-election defeat. Mirkarimi cited San Francisco’s sanctuary city law in declining to notify federal immigration officials that he was about to release an undocumented Mexican with a criminal record.

The Trump administration has invoked Garcia Zarate and the slaying in its effort, unsuccessful so far, to strip federal funds from cities and states that refuse to take part in immigration enforcement. The House of Representatives, meanwhile, passed Kate’s Law, which would increase prison sentences for immigrants who, like the shooter, re-enter the U.S. after deportation.

All of that is supposed to be off the table for the jury that convenes Monday in San Francisco Superior Court, for opening statements in a trial scheduled to last seven weeks. Jurors will be instructed, instead, to consider only the evidence they hear in court on a single, crucial question: Did Garcia Zarate shoot Steinle intentionally, or was it an accident?

Famous illegals in the news.