On Wednesday night, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly held the Obama administration’s feet to the fire in a segment on sanctuary-city policies and Kathryn Steinle, the 32-year-old woman shot last week by a criminal illegal alien.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest has repeatedly declined to comment on Steinle’s murder, telling reporters to talk to the Department of Homeland Security.
Kelly wasn’t having any it. She contrasted the Obama administration’s evasive response to Steinle’s death with the administration’s response to the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=h-keYVMJOkk
This cannot be turfed to Homeland Security. The White House owes the public an answer: a direct, straightforward, simple answer, because it was this administration that apparently stopped a measure to combat sanctuary cities like the one in San Francisco in the first place.
They have got to speak to their ongoing support for these policies. It isn’t okay to try to turf it to Homeland Security. Who ultimately runs Homeland Security? President Obama is in charge of all of it. He can’t dodge responsibility for the policies he refuses to support at the federal level, the laws that are on the books by saying: take it up with Saldaña or Jeh Johnson. They answer to him.
He allowed this to happen. They – the administration knew the person he placed in charge of ICE was telling Congress, ‘yes, help us, get these cities into compliance’ and someone took her behind the wood shed and said you’re reversing that explicitly and now they don’t want to answer for it because they know the press will be too lazy to hold them to account. It is lawlessness.
— Isaac Cohen is an intern at National Review.