Exracted from MSNBC

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On a Wednesday evening in July — fifteen days after Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by painting a picture of the United States besieged by crime and illegal immigration — shots rang out along the San Francisco pier.
Kate Steinle, 32, was walking along the city’s touristy promenade when a bullet struck her in the back. She screamed for her father, Jim, as she collapsed to the ground. He tried to save her by performing CPR until help arrived, but it was too late. Kate Steinle died in the hospital hours later.
Authorities would later find that an undocumented immigrant with a long criminal record had pulled the trigger. Police arrested and charged Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a man with seven felony convictions to his name and who had been deported back to Mexico five times. He had even been in police custody for a separate crime just months before the shooting. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) never took Lopez-Sanchez into custody once he was released from jail. Instead of being deported, Lopez-Sanchez was able to stand at a crowded U.S. landmark with a gun in his hand.
Critics said that the city of San Francisco could have prevented Kate Steinle’s death. For more than three decades, it had billed itself as a safe haven for immigrants. Known to immigration advocates as a “sanctuary city,” San Francisco barred local police from helping federal authorities kick out any immigrants that came to the U.S. illegally.
The policy was largely symbolic. City officials didn’t have the power to outright stop the federal government from deporting people in their community. But in the spirit of America’s founding principles as a nation of immigrants, sanctuary cities act as a protective shield, standing in the way of federal efforts to pinpoint and deport people at random.

Men play cards along the sidewalk of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Before Kate Steinle’s death, the term “sanctuary city” had been hardly known outside the advocacy world. But now it was at the forefront of a bitter public debate over immigration.
In Washington, D.C., Congressional Republicans attempted to pass a pair of bills to force sanctuary cities to detain undocumented immigrants until the ICE could deport them. They threatened to take away federal funding from police departments that refused to cooperate. A handful of state legislatures were willing to do the same.
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly took the issue mainstream. For nearly the entire summer, he railed against sanctuary cities almost daily to his roughly three million nightly viewers. Even Democrats were starting to have second thoughts about whether sanctuary protections for immigrants were worth the potential costs.