A top House Republican is blaming President Obama’s immigration policies for the death of a U.S. Air Force veteran who was allegedly raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant freed just days earlier after posting bail on drug and weapons charges.
“How many Americans must die at the hands of unlawful criminal immigrants before the Obama Administration takes a serious look at the failure of its own policies?” House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) said Friday.
Goodlatte issued the statement in response to the August 1 death of Marilyn Pharis, a 64-year-old woman from Santa Maria, Calif., who was brutally attacked in her home on July 24. Police arrested two men for the crime, one of whom, Victor Ramirez, had been released from jail on July 20.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked Santa Barbara custody officials to put a detention hold on [Ramirez] last year after he was charged with felony assault with intent to commit sexual assault,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “The detainer was meant to ensure Ramirez would be transferred into federal custody before his release. But his case was downgraded to a misdemeanor. . . . Federal officials said they declined to issue an immigration detainer on Ramirez last month because his case history failed to turn up any deportations or felony criminal convictions.”
That history incensed local law enforcement. “Two weeks before this murder Santa Maria Police officers arrested him for possession of meth,” Santa Maria Police Chief Ralph Martin said at a press conference last week. “You know what we had to do? We had to cite him out. That’s the problem with this system, this is not just in Santa Maria, this is all over the state of California and all over the United States. . . . From Washington, D.C., to Sacramento there’s a blood trail leading to the bedroom of Marilyn Pharis.”
Goodlatte echoed Martin’s denunciation of so-called “sanctuary cities,” local communities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officers. Such jurisdictions have received national attention in recent weeks following the murder of a San Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant who would have been deported if local law enforcement had cooperated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The Obama Administration should be leading the way in immigration enforcement so states and localities can no longer ignore federal law and enact dangerous sanctuary policies,” Goodlatte said. “Instead, this Administration’s misguided policy that only certain criminal convictions should render an unlawful immigrant a ‘priority’ for removal — leads to countless crimes inflicted on Americans and legal immigrants.”
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.