A San Francisco resident who was attacked by an illegal immigrant in 2008 blamed the incident on then-district attorney Kamala Harris's soft-on-crime policies, scoffing at the vice president’s record as a California prosecutor in an interview with ABC Monday.
In July 2008, Amanda Kiefer was attacked and run down in San Francisco by 20-year-old Alexander Izaguirre, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, leaving her with a fractured skull. Izaguirre was arrested months earlier on drug charges but released thanks to then-district attorney Harris’s Back on Track initiative, a soft-on-crime policy that allowed young nonviolent drug offenders to avoid jail by enrolling in a 12-month community service program.
As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris has touted her record as a "tough prosecutor" along the campaign trail, but Kiefer called that message "laughable," ABC reported.
A self-professed liberal at the time, Kiefer says she now supports Republican candidate Donald Trump's policies.
"When a policy negatively affects you, you wake up," Kiefer, now 45, told ABC News regarding the Harris-backed policy that allowed her attacker to evade jail time. "If people who committed crimes were allowed to stay out of prison to train for jobs they couldn't legally hold, I think most Americans would disapprove of that," Kiefer continued.
As part of the Back on Track program, offenders who received job training and completed a 12-18 month program would get their records expunged. There was, however, as Harris admitted to the Los Angeles Times in 2009, a "flaw in the design" of the program that let noncitizen perpetrators who were in the country illegally, like Izaguirre, receive the job training and remain free, even though they couldn't legally acquire a job.
Kiefer’s story was brought back into the spotlight by a Trump campaign ad released two days after President Joe Biden caved to party pressure and ended his reelection bid.
During the 2008 attack, Izaguirre stole Kiefer’s purse and jumped into a getaway SUV. The driver of the vehicle then tried to run Kiefer down, leaving her with a fractured skull.
Since becoming her party's presumptive nominee, Harris has denied her role as "border czar" and has refrained from discussing the southern border, which saw unprecedented levels of migrant crossings under the Biden-Harris administration.