From TheBlaze.com:
“Help me, dad.”
Those are the last words Jim Steinle said he heard from his daughter Kate before police say she was fatally shot by Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant who had already been deported several times.
“Suddenly, a shot rang out, Kate fell and looked up at me and said, ‘Help me, dad,’” Steinle said in an emotional testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. “Those were the last words I will ever hear from my daughter.”
Steinle described his daughter as “a good citizen of the United States of America” who loved to travel the world.
“Unfortunately due to disjointed laws and basic incompetence on many levels, the U.S. has suffered a self-inflicted wound in the murder of our daughter by the hand of a person that should have never been on the streets of this country,” Steinle said.
Steinle, who is advocating for immigration reform, said it’s “unbelievable” that so many Americans have died at the hands of undocumented immigrants.
“We’d be proud to see Kate’s name associated with some of this new legislation,” he said. “We feel if Kate’s law saves one daughter, one son, a mother, a father, Kate’s death won’t be in vain.”
Kate’s brother, Brad Steinle, also slammed San Francisco’s sanctuary policies during an interview with Fox News last week.
Kate was 32-years-old when she died.
Who is responsible for the illegal immigrant crime wave? Many parties, but the Jewish establishment in America certainly holds a large part of the blood guilt. The blood of Kate Steinle falls on Jewish immigration activists.
Jewish values at heart of immigration reform
by Rachel Heller Zaimont
Posted on Feb. 12, 2014 at 11:31 amLast May, an unusual delegation arrived at the State Capitol building in Sacramento: a contingent of some 50 Reform Jews, clergy and lay leaders, hailing from congregations across California. They had come to campaign for the Trust Act, a bill designed to limit deportations of undocumented immigrants in the state. A few months after their visit, Gov. Jerry Brown would sign the Trust Act into law as part of a sweeping October push for immigration reform. But that wasn’t assured at the time.
The bill had just passed through the California Assembly and was primed for review by the State Senate during the summer. Questions swirled: Were enough senators on board to vote in its favor? Was the language strong enough? Brown had vetoed a previous version of the Trust Act in 2012 — was this edition something he would sign?
Rabbi Larry Raphael, of Congregation Sherith Israel, and several other San Francisco rabbis stood in a corridor discussing these concerns with an aide to state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), when an assemblyman walked by. He noticed the kippot worn by a few in the group and caught the drift of their conversation. “You’re here about the Trust Act?” the assemblyman asked. The clergy confirmed.
“Is immigration a Jewish issue?” he pressed skeptically.
Raphael answered, “We believe it is.”
It was a moment of affirmation in a historic campaign that united more than 1,000 Reform Jews throughout California in political advocacy for the better part of 2013. The Jewish campaign for the Trust Act coalesced under the banner of Reform CA, a new statewide initiative of the Reform movement aiming to reinvigorate social justice in synagogues and connect those small-scale pockets of energy to spur large-scale political change. The initiative’s first year was marked by trial and error, perseverance and ultimate triumph — along with unprecedented collaboration between congregations and clergy on what some might consider an unlikely Jewish cause.
The Trust Act, which took effect Jan. 1, prohibits local law enforcement from holding undocumented immigrants for deportation in California unless they have committed a serious felony. Previously, those who had committed minor offenses could be detained for deportation, leading to a strained relationship with authorities in immigrant communities and the separation of parents from children with legal status.
“This wasn’t an obvious issue,” said Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, co-director of Just Congregations, the community-organizing arm of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and lead organizer of Reform CA. “But we share this state. We will partner with our brothers and sisters across lines of race, class and faith to address the pain that we all share when this system is so broken.”
The seeds for this partnership were planted when Kolin moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to open the West Coast office of Just Congregations. She began working with synagogues across the Southland to help them kick-start social action programs, tackling local issues of injustice on a grass-roots level. But she found that many Southern California rabbis had an appetite to make bigger change than they could muster individually. And she started to understand the power of a crucial idea: “Together,” she said, “we are more powerful than we are when we stand alone.”
…For some rabbis and congregants, the issue was more immediate. Bruce Corwin, chairman and CEO of Metropolitan Theatres Corp. and a member of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, said he has had employees rounded up and deported during ICE raids. “They’re just scared to death,” Corwin said. “A lot of parents have been separated from their families. It’s a terrible thing that happens in this country.”…On Tisha B’Av, a holiday of typically low attendance in Reform congregations, about 100 members from 10 Los Angeles synagogues gathered at Leo Baeck’s outdoor chapel to hear a teaching on how the destruction of the Temple mirrors the destruction of what is sacred to immigrants today. HUC-JIR professor Rabbi Lewis Barth challenged attendees to ponder: If they — of influence and sway — don’t access justice for their community, how can those on the fringes of society do so?
During the High Holy Days, dozens of rabbis across the state preached about immigration reform in their sermons, asking congregants to call the governor’s office to urge him to sign the bill. Simonds reminded University Synagogue’s young professionals’ group that Jews have felt the hand of oppression, and they now had the power to transform it into a hand of welcome. A number of congregants took out their phones right there and wrote notes to call Brown’s office, he said.
…At Leo Baeck, Rabbi Ken Chasen’s preaching led to another unexpected windfall. The day after Rosh Hashanah, an influential congregant set up a personal phone call between Chasen and the governor. Chasen told Brown that during the High Holy Days, when sermons usually take on worldly issues, Reform rabbis across California were making immigration their focus. “They weren’t mobilizing around speaking about Israel, or Iran,” Chasen said. “What was speaking to them was this issue of immigration within our state. This issue was deeply embedded within the hearts and souls of Jewish Californians.”
Brown told Chasen he hadn’t realized immigration was so important to Jewish constituents and thanked him for the call.
“When you start on a campaign of this sort, you just don’t know which is the moment that might lead to the greatest amount of access, the greatest amount of power, the greatest amount of influence,” Chasen said. “The narrative that unfolded was one that we could never have predicted.”
Nothing in the Jewish Journal article questions whether this support for illegal immigration is a good idea, but the commenters do:
* So it’s all your fault! Darn, I think I need to turn into a jew hater now.
* Israel has become deportation central with a fence system that jewish, including rabbis, won’t allow us to have. We should apply the Israeli model on immigration.
* Why do all these `holy` jews support deportations and walls for Israel but not the US? These jews are all anti American hypocrites.
* Deportation is an important part of enforcement of immigration laws. If illegal immigrants are allowed to remain in the USA and government relies on self deportation it sends the message that illegal immigration is ok. Illegal immigration is not ok and contrary to Jewish values. Illegal immigration devalues labor in an already extremely bad environment where most Americans are living hand to mouth or worse. The Torah and Talmud call for a society where work allows people to have a decent life. By flooding the job market even more with illegal immigrants both illegal workers and illegal immigrants are led to work in abysmal conditions.
* Kol hakavod to these Reform Jews.
The verse that occurs most often in the Torah (36 times) is some variation of, be kind to the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
* But where in the Torah does it talk about deportations? The is a difference between being kind to a stranger and not having law. Immigration laws protect working people–immigrants and natives alike–how is it kind to anyone except exploiting businesses to allow illegal immigrants to stay in this economy only to drive the labor market further down when most Americans are living hand to mouth or worse. Both Torah and Talmud support a having a labor market where people can live decently. Allowing illegal immigrants to stay in this economy is against this value.
