Trump is Right About Illegals, Says Grieving Father

By Matthew Vadum

A fiery black opponent of so-called sanctuary cities whose teenaged son was murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien gangster from Mexico is cheering on Donald Trump for demanding that the U.S. government enforce existing immigration laws.

“I felt happy for the first time,” Jamiel Shaw Sr. said in an interview with Fox News.

“When that happened, I felt good. I felt hope. This is the hope that Obama thought he was gonna get. That was false hope.”

Shaw was referring to the explosively controversial remarks by the ultra-high profile Trump, an outspoken New York-based billionaire who is seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for 2016. Trump became the focus of water cooler and social media conversations across America and beyond when he spoke last month of the problems that illegal aliens from Mexico cause the host country they invade.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best,” Trump said at the launch of his presidential campaign. He continued:

They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.

Shaw said he hadn’t planned on voting next year but he has changed his mind. Now he intends to cast his ballot for Trump.

“This is a beautiful thing,” he continued, adding that seven years after his son was cut down, recent events mean, “if you’re trying to stop illegal immigration, everybody’s listening.”

If one particular illegal alien had been prevented from entering the U.S. or captured and deported, Shaw says his son would still be among the living.

“We call it getting killed by invisible people, because they aren’t supposed to be here,” he said.

Shaw is far from alone. Americans have been begging the federal government for years and years and years to get serious about immigration enforcement and border security. Their concerns about porous borders are even more urgent today as the U.S. battles Islamofascist terrorists hellbent on harming the country these totalitarian medieval barbarians call the Great Satan.

Sanctuary cities, or immigration enforcement no-go zones, defy federal law and shelter illegal aliens from Uncle Sam, providing a powerful incentive for even more illegal aliens to sneak across the border. (I looked at the issue of sanctuary cities and examined how leftist groups like the ACLU promoted this treasonous assault on America in a FrontPage article yesterday.)

The nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies unveiled a map yesterday showing more than 200 sanctuary cities in 32 states and the District of Columbia. But Jessica Vaughan, CSI’s director of policy studies, says there could be more than 300 sanctuary cities in the U.S.

“One could also argue than any jurisdiction that provides drivers licenses, or welfare benefits, or public housing, or municipal ID cards [to illegal aliens] is a sanctuary.”

Whatever the total count may be, the list of sanctuary cities, which are overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled, is long and growing longer. A list compiled by an activist shows there are at least 30 in California alone including Oakland, San Bernardino, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Other major sanctuary cities across the country are Albuquerque, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Washington D.C.

Although their friends on the Left vehemently deny it, what these traitor cities do is itself unlawful, according to Hans von Spakovsky. But they get away with it because President Obama is determined to dismantle America’s immigration system in order to swamp the nation with desperately poor, barely educated, unskilled or low-skilled peasants from the Third World. It’s part of his scheme to fundamentally transform America.

Sanctuary cities, the Heritage Foundation scholar writes, are

directly violating federal law … Under Section 642 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. §1373), it is a violation of federal law for any state or local government to “prohibit, or in any way restrict” law enforcement or other government officials from sending or receiving information from the federal government on the “citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.”

Amazingly, federal racketeering charges have not been brought against organizers and agitators promoting sanctuary cities. If it could be proven that they have acted in concert around the country in a conspiracy to block the enforcement of federal law, some of these crime-loving advocates could end up bankrupt or in prison.

Returning to Jamiel Shaw Sr., this man’s unexpected journey began in the early evening of Sunday, March 2, 2008, when his son Jamiel Shaw Jr., reportedly a clean-cut 17-year-old star high school athlete, was gunned down by a young illegal alien while walking home.

Shaw, the FoxNews.com article states,

has spent the seven years since his son was killed fighting so-called “sanctuary” policies in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where police refuse to work with federal authorities when they apprehend illegal aliens who, by law, should be deported. The crimes they subsequently commit — including murder — should never happen, Shaw said.

Shaw said the senseless killing last week of Kathryn Steinle on Pier 14 in San Francisco by a five-time deportee from Mexico made him think again of the “invisible people” phrase. Her murder coupled with Trump’s comments appear to be changing the dynamic of the 2016 electoral contest by putting the long-simmering issue of sanctuary cities that unlawfully harbor illegal aliens back on the front burner.

Steinle was shot in the back for reasons unknown by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a 45-year-old illegal alien with a second grade education who reportedly has seven felony convictions. He promptly confessed to the murder on television and acknowledged he kept returning to San Francisco because he knew no pesky law enforcement personnel would bother him there.

This leftist utopia of San Francisco, whose officials regard laws that prevent foreigners from sauntering into America at will as unjust, previously released the man even though federal officials characterized him as an “enforcement priority” and filed an “immigration detainer” asking jailers to hold him until they could take custody of him.

As in the case of Steinle, the murder of Shaw’s son took only a moment.

Police say two Latino males jumped out of a car in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, and demanded to know what gang Jamiel was a member of. A regular churchgoer who relatives said didn’t belong to a gang, Jamiel had been talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone and didn’t answer immediately. He was then shot in the head and back just three doors away from his residence.

“My son was shot in the head by an illegal alien gang banger while he lay on his back with his hands up,” according to his father. “He still shot him through his hand into his head and killed him.”

At the time his mother, U.S. Army Sgt. Anita Shaw, was on her second tour of duty in Iraq.

“She’s over there trying to protect us from guns and bombs, and then she has to hear that her son is dead over here,” Mr. Shaw said. “I’ve got my own personal Iraq now.”

Jamiel’s distraught mother contacted his aunt, Althea Shaw, from Iraq.

“She called crying, saying, ‘Tell me it’s not my son,’ ” said the aunt. “She was so proud. She felt he had made it through the hard times. She still called him her baby, even though he was taller than her.”

In November 2012 Jamiel’s murderer, a Mexican national named Pedro Espinoza, who by this point was 23 years old, was sentenced to death for his crime by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald Rose. “This defendant executed the victim … as he lay defenseless and incapacitated on the ground, without a weapon,” the judge said.

Espinoza, a confirmed member of the notorious 18th Street Gang, slew Jamiel because he was carrying a red-colored Spider Man backpack, prosecutors said. Espinoza apparently misinterpreted the display of the red backpack, believing Jamiel was flying the colors of rival gang the Rolling 20s. (Although it has no direct bearing on the question of Espinoza’s guilt, some local commentators insisted Jamiel was a gang member, as LA Weeklyreported at the time.)

Even at his sentencing hearing, Espinoza was trying to game the system, just as he had done for years as an illegal alien gaming the immigration system and undoubtedly taking advantage of the near-boundless generosity of America through its taxpayer-supported social programs. His lawyers argued Jamiel really was a gang member, as if that might somehow mitigate the brutal slaying.

The judge wasn’t sympathetic to Espinoza’s motion for a new trial.

“It’s not uncommon for attorneys to attempt to fall on their swords in order to save their client’s life,” Rose said to defense lawyer Csaba Palfi. “The defendant is a very intelligent individual, who through his refusal to cooperate with his own attorneys has tried to establish that his attorneys are incompetent.”

Convinced that his son would be alive today if authorities had gotten around to deporting Espinoza, Shaw campaigned to get the proposed “Jamiel’s Law” on the ballot for the March 2009 election but fell short. The measure would have repealed Special Order 40, a Los Angeles Police Department document that in 1979 established the City of the Angels as the first U.S. sanctuary city.

Special Order 40 forbids police officers from inquiring about the immigration status of individuals not suspected of crimes. The LAPD explained the rationale for the directive this way:

The Department is sensitive to the principle that effective law enforcement depends on a high degree of cooperation between the Department and the public … [and] also recognizes that the Constitution of the United States guarantees equal protection to all persons within its jurisdiction. In view of those principles, it is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department that undocumented alien status in itself is not a matter for police action.

Left-wingers helped to kill the Jamiel’s Law plebiscite.

Professional race hustler Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black commentator who was born in the sanctuary city of Chicago, is a well-known illegal alien sympathizer. He said at the time:

The Shaws are well-meaning, and public sympathy was with them. But race and politics have rammed their way into this debate with a vengeance. My fear is that this is pitting blacks against Latinos by people who know illegal immigration hits a sore nerve with African-Americans. And so they latched on to this and have made it part of their political agenda.

This is one of the more creative excuses devised to allow the LAPD’s lawless assault on the nation’s borders, language, culture, and its struggling, illegal alien-saturated labor markets to continue.

It needs to be said that Hutchinson, a prolific author of paranoid race-obsessed drivel, isn’t exactly a rational, neutral observer. He adores kooky conspiracy theories and has served as a useful idiot for the former Soviet Union. For example, he publicly opposed the canonization of Pius XII, the wartime Roman Catholic pope, claiming the pontiff was a Nazi sympathizer complicit in the deaths of many Jews.

Along with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax, the claim that Pius was a vicious Jew-hater is also a politically-motivated hoax. In reality Pius, like Oskar Schindler, went out of his way at great personal risk to shield Jews from the Nazis. The lie is popular on the Left and was reportedly invented by Soviet intelligence agents during the Cold War to discredit the Catholic Church. Moscow took aim at the Vatican because the Polish-born Pope John Paul II (now Saint John Paul the Great) vocally supported the trade union Solidarity which was leading the fight against Poland’s then-Soviet-aligned Communist state.

Undeterred by Hutchinson and his ilk, Shaw has taken his fight to eradicate the scourge of sanctuary cities to Congress.

The illegal alien who “murdered my son only served four months of an eight month sentence for assault with a deadly weapon and battery on a police officer,” Shaw told a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee panel in February.

“He was released from the county jail the day before he executed my son. Why was this violent illegal alien allowed to walk the streets of America instead of being deported?”

“Do black lives really matter or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or a white policeman?” he said after referring to the “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra that went viral after white police officer Darren Wilson shot black 18-year-old Michael Brown in self-defense after a physical altercation in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

At the hearing Shaw embraced a legislative fix proposed by Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.).

“Until the FBI is allowed to track and report illegal alien crime, it is doubtful that the American people will understand how severe the problem of violent illegal alien crime is,” Shaw said. “What we really need is comprehensive immigration enforcement.”

Shaw would agree that it’s time to take these “invisible people” out of the shadows, shackle their hands and feet, and put them on airplanes and busses bound for their various countries of origin.

¡Si se puede!

Oh yes we can.