The shooting death of a woman on San Francisco pier allegedly by convicted felon illegally in the United States illustrates a disconnect between federal immigration officials who wanted him deported and local officials who ultimately let him go…

“As a result, an individual with a lengthy criminal history, who is now the suspect in a tragic murder case, was released onto the street rather than being turned over to ICE for deportation,” said Gillian Christensen, an ICE spokeswoman, said Monday…

“We’re not asking local law enforcement to do our job…all we’re asking is that they notify us when a serious foreign national criminal offender is being released to the street so we can arrange to take custody,” Christensen said.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Friday that the seemingly random killing of a young woman in San Francisco was even more proof why voters should send him to the White House…

“This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately,” Trump said in a statement Friday. “This is an absolutely disgraceful situation and I am the only one that can fix it. Nobody else has the guts to even talk about it. That won’t happen if I become President.”…

“The American people deserve a wall to protect our jobs, economy and our safety. I am the only candidate who would build it,” Trump said in his statement before returning to his slogan, “I will make America great again!”

Rick Santorum, for his part, praised Trump’s focus on the issue, while stopping short of endorsing his rhetoric.

“While I don’t like the verbiage he’s used, I like the fact that he is focused on a very important issue for American workers and particularly, legal immigrants in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

Other Republicans had much sharper words.

“Donald Trump does not represent the Republican Party,” former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said during a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” adding that the remarks offended him.

Statement from Donald J. Trump:…

What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc. This was evident just this week when, as an example, a young woman in San Francisco was viciously killed by a 5 time deported Mexican with a long criminal record, who was forced back into the United States because they didn’t want him in Mexico. This is merely one of thousands of similar incidents throughout the United States. In other words, the worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government. The largest suppliers of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs are Mexican cartels that arrange to have Mexican immigrants trying to cross the borders and smuggle in the drugs. The Border Patrol knows this. Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border. The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world. On the other hand, many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it. But these people are here legally, and are severely hurt by those coming in illegally. I am proud to say that I know many hard working Mexicans—many of them are working for and with me…and, just like our country, my organization is better for it.

The Mexican Government wants an open border as long as it’s a ONE WAY open border into the United States. Not only are they killing us at the border, but they are killing us on trade … and the country of Mexico is making billions of dollars in doing so…

I have lost a lot during this Presidential run defending the people of the United States. I have always heard that it is very hard for a successful person to run for President. Macy’s, NBC, Serta and NASCAR have all taken the weak and very sad position of being politically correct even though they are wrong in terms of what is good for our country. Univision, because 70% of their business comes from Mexico, in my opinion, is being dictated to by the Mexican Government. The last thing Mexico wants is Donald Trump as President in that I will make great trade deals for the United States and will have an impenetrable border–only legally approved people will come through easily.

“The first point to make is that Trump is resonating with a lot of people,” Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Hill.
 
“It’s not just Republicans, but a lot of ordinary Americans,” he said. “It’s precisely because regular politicians aren’t addressing the issues they are concerned about.”
 
“When you’re looking at the whole country – the Democratic and the Republican electorates both – they’re almost screaming for alternatives to what they’ve been presented.”…

“When people aren’t having their concerns addressed, they’ll listen to the clown,” he said.

Beyond some conservatives’ overheated worries that Mexicans will become future welfare dependents, Trump’s claims that Mexican immigrants are a bunch of criminals, except for “some, I assume, [who] are decent people,” is not just racist, it’s flat-out wrong. Crime has been going down in the U.S. at the very time that immigration, including illegal immigration, has been increasing. Violent crime has been dropping since 1994 and is now at levels not seen since the 1970s. Incidentally, illegal immigration shot up dramatically between 1995 and 2000, and the population of illegal immigrants peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million. Some academics have argued that this is no mere coincidence. Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson claims, based on his study of violent crime in Chicago neighborhoods, that “living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration was directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of correlated factors, including poverty and an individual’s immigrant status). Immigration thus appeared ‘protective’ against violence.”

I won’t make a case that higher immigration levels have led to the dramatic decline in violent crime in the U.S., since correlation is not causation, but trying to link Mexicans to increased crime certainly doesn’t comport with the facts. It’s not that Donald Trump was politically incorrect in his pronouncements — and is now being punished for them — it’s that his comments were based on nothing but ignorance and bigotry. In fact, according to an analysis of FBI crime statistics by Congressional Quarterly, of the ten safest big cities, fully six are in California and Texas and have very large Mexican-origin populations, and a seventh, New York City, has a large Hispanic population as well. Indeed, El Paso, the safest big city in the U.S. for several years running, has a population that is 81 percent Hispanic, including 26 percent who are Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal.

When conservatives are asked why they think Trump’s candidacy is resonating with the right, they most commonly reply, “He is saying things that people want to hear.” This says less about the electorate than it does about the candidate capturing so many disaffected imaginations. When voters are faced with unpleasant realities, there will always be a market for comforting fictions; just ask the Greeks. A legitimate problem for the GOP is, however, that too many believe that Trump is disseminating hard truths when the opposite is the case.

Republican voters love to hear Trump contend that a new Great Wall across the Mexican border, inexplicably paid for by the Mexican government, will permanently curtail illegal immigration. They love to hear the claim that America is getting a raw deal when it engages in exchanges with its second-largest trading partner, the People’s Republic of China. They love the notion that a more steely-eyed negotiator would pacify Russia without the commitment of substantial treasure and the requirement of sacrifice on the part of the West. Everyone loves a salesman when he’s pitching the deal of the century…

“Foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their life course,” observed University of Massachusetts Sociology Professor Bianca Bersani in a study published in Justice Quarterly. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, the Pew Research Center helped quantify Bersani’s work and discovered that native-born Americans are most likely to have committed one crime in the last 12 months followed closely by second generation Americans. “Since undocumented immigrants are more than a quarter of the immigrant population, it’s nearly impossible that the overall-immigrant crime rate could be so much lower if the undocumented-immigrant crime rate were significantly higher,” Bump observed.

Trump’s dismissive comments about how the United States has become a “dumping ground” for castaways from Mexico sound like something you’d hear bandied about at a Guadalajara country club or a fancy banquet in Mexico City…

[I]t is interesting that Trump has became so unpopular with the Mexican elites, who are usually content to watch from a safe distance the divisive immigration debate in the United States. If you’re a doctor or lawyer or businessman in Mexico City, and you shop at Louis Vuitton and spend your summer vacations in Europe, the plight of poor and uneducated Mexican migrants in the United States must seem like someone else’s problem. 

Mexico is a country divided—by political parties, generations, skin color, geography, urban vs. rural. You name it. But the deepest division has to be based on class lines…

In fact, that’s one thing that Americans and Mexicans have in common: Both groups are too proud to admit how dependent they are on Mexican migrants who work in the United States, and acknowledge how much those migrants contribute. 

The idea that Donald Trump is so damaging to the GOP brand is itself laughable because the GOP has worked rather well in destroying its own brand. When the upper echelons of the party declare outright war on its conservative peers and its conservative voting base (which is much larger than its moderate base), you see what happens to the party. Rife with division, we have a GOP establishment that has constantly pushed out weak candidates with more than just “moderate” leanings and fought tooth and nail to keep conservative candidates out of multiple races. It is very clearly in the pocket of major corporate interests and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but accuses its opponents of being in it for the money…

The Trump Candidacy is not so much about Trump’s appeal, though there is a certain charm to it. Rather, it is a direct repudiation of the “politics as usual” policy of the greater Republican party that has shown itself to be weak on such a vital domestic issue. The GOP has done everything it can to either not fight (or, at times, support) blanket, executive amnesty, the likes of which is a clear overreach of the powers of the executive branch. Their lack of action on an issue that could easily win back a chunk of their support proves they have no clear grasp of how to handle an electorate that is slowly but surely becoming more and more active in electoral politics.

So why are so many Republican voters flirting with a crazy loudmouthed liberal? I think it’s mostly because of the 2nd thing…loudmouthed.

The Trump bubble is what you get when a significant part of the GOP is tired of being lied to and screwed over. They want to be heard and they want to see their values (in this case anger, which is an emotion not a value but it’s a reasonable stand in at this point) reflected in a candidate.

(And if you think he’s going away anytime soon, you haven’t noticed that he’s already paying a price for running. There’s no advantage in pulling out now. Bridges are going to be burned.)…

Conservatives helped deliver historic GOP wins last year in the House and gave the party the Senate back. What exactly do they have to show for it? An amnesty cave, more deficit spending and an Obama legacy building trade package that they aren’t too sure about. Oh and soaring approval ratings for Obama now that he has vanquished the GOP “hostage takers”.

“It has to be said: Romney has a 20-year primo record on immigration. Vetoed in-state tuition for illegal aliens, vetoed free healthcare for illegal aliens,” Coulter said.

He was going to veto driver’s licenses for illegal aliens but that never made it to his desk. He never backed away from self-deport when he was running as our candidate last time. Why? Then he comes out and condemns Trump? Trump speaks in a blunt, harsh manner that Romney doesn’t have to speak in. So what you have to leap out and condemn him? What about condemning Jeb for calling illegal immigration an “act of love?”…

“Isn’t he [Trump] magnificent? One thing—I think he could mention my book,” Coulter said on the show on Monday morning.

But I really think he is magnificent. I’m almost stunned at how good he’s being especially considering the world he lives in. He’s a fancy Manhattan-ite—and I’m sure who vacations in the Hamptons—all of his friends disagree with him. You very rarely see this in any place—in any group of people—and he really is just standing up for the American working class like I’ve never seen. The American working class really likes him, and always has, and I think his next move should be that he should point out that he’s the only one who cares about black jobs. I mean have you seen the black unemployment rate? How dare liberals accuse him of racism? They don’t even have an argument. He’s the one trying to defend American jobs and particularly with the black youth unemployment rate. How about letting Americans take those jobs instead of the foreign born poor?