Mitch Perry
The furor over Donald Trump‘s comments about Mexican immigrants shows no sign of diminishing with ESPN deciding Tuesday to pull its charity golf tournament from his Southern California course .
It’s been a very rough week for the celebrity/businessman/GOP presidential candidate, with major corporations such as Macy’s, NBC and Univision cutting ties with him in the wake of his disparaging comments last month, when he said, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” adding, “and some, I assume, are good people.'”
But Trump is doubling down on those comments and using the tragic shooting death of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle last week by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant who had a string of felonies and deportations but was freed in April despite a detainer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials by the city’s sheriff.
Much is being made of San Francisco’s ’s sanctuary city policy from 2013, which prohibits the release of undocumented immigrants to ICE unless they have committed violent felonies. According to reports, though Lopez-Sanchez had been deported several times, none of his felonies were violent ones, and thus remained in line with San Francisco policy.
The issue has caught fire on conservative talk radio and other jurisdictions that have said for years that we shouldn’t move on immigration policy until we our border with Mexico is strengthened. Immigration reform was already an issue going into this campaign, and Trump’s incendiary comments have blown it up.
But Lopez-Sanchez has put it into a whole new category, and the anger may be bipartisan. In an interview on CNN Tuesday, Hillary Clinton said, “I think the city made a mistake” by not handing Lopez-Sanchez over to ICE, and said he should have been deported.
Bill O’Reilly on Monday night blasted San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city and the federal government’s unwillingness to confront it for being so means that “the mayor and city supervisors of San Francisco are directly responsible for the murder of Kate Steinle, and the Obama administration is complicit.”
It will be interesting if this story dies out in another week, or goes deeper. With Trump running, my betting’s on the latter.
In other news …
Marco Rubio gave a much hyped domestic speech in Chicago Tuesday. Although he blasted Hillary Clinton as being the purveyor of “yesterday,” Democrats countered that the speech was pure “retro Rubio.”
• • •
Twelve days ago, Bob Buckhorn went on a public affairs show in Tallahassee to talk about — well, what do you think might have come up?
• • •
More establishment organizations are coming out and filing legal briefs with the Florida Supreme Court against the Solar Power proposed constitutional amendment. But the League of Cities brief may be challenged by some of its members.
• • •
And Alan Grayson was hit with a second ethics complaint in two days on Tuesday in Washington. Another fellow Florida Democrat called his actions “an embarrassment,” but the firebrand liberal’s supporters say nothing has happened to dissuade them from supporting him if and when he enters the Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate.
