Less than two hours after President Joe Biden announced last week his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, the Republican National Committee released a two-minute campaign ad calling Vice President Kamala Harris “dangerously liberal” and saying she “was liberal on illegal immigration before she even reached the White House.”
The ad highlighted the 2008 story of a San Francisco woman who was assaulted by a man who was in the country illegally and had been arrested months earlier on drug charges — but was released under a new program launched by Harris, then the city’s district attorney.
Now, as Harris tries to portray her campaign against former President Donald Trump as a choice between a tough prosecutor and a convicted felon, 2008 assault victim Amanda Kiefer is calling Harris’ message “ridiculous.”
“When a policy affects you negatively, you wake up,” Keifer, now 45, told ABC News, speaking publicly about her experience for the first time in 15 years.
According to the RNC ad, Harris “gave illegal immigrant drug traffickers the opportunity to get job training” instead of going to prison.
The program, called Back on Track, was touted as an anti-crime initiative that could reduce recidivism rates by allowing low-level, nonviolent offenders to redirect their lives away from crime. Offenders who received vocational training and completed the program had their criminal records expunged.
But, as Harris told the Los Angeles Times when the newspaper first broke Kiefer’s story in 2009, there was a “design flaw” in the program — an unintended loophole — that allowed writers who were in the country illegally to receive job training and remain free, even if they couldn’t legally get a job.
A Harris spokesperson declined to comment officially for this story.
“Most Americans would disapprove”
In July 2008, when she was 29, she was walking with a group of friends in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood when 20-year-old Alexander Izaguirre stole her purse and jumped into a waiting SUV. The driver of the vehicle then tried to run Kiefer over, leaving him with a fractured skull.
“If people who have committed crimes were allowed to stay out of prison to train for jobs they can’t legally do, I think most Americans would disapprove of that,” Kiefer told ABC News.
Harris seemed to agree with this as early as 15 years ago, telling the Los Angeles Times that “the goal of the program is to … get and keep legal employment” — and that someone in the country illegally “would probably not be able to do that, which would go against the whole spirit of the program.”
“I think we’ve fixed that,” Harris said of the gap at the time. “So now it’s about making sure that no one gets into the Back on Track program who can’t hold down a legal job.”
In total, fewer than a dozen undocumented immigrants have been able to benefit from the program, which has reportedly become a model for other law enforcement agencies across the country.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex, July 25, 2024.
Julia Nikhinson/AP
Yet Trump and his supporters are now seeking to reintroduce Kiefer’s story to counter the vice president’s tough stance on crime and to fuel the false narrative that undocumented immigrants have contributed to a nationwide rise in crime, which is contradicted by statistics showing that U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as people who are in the country illegally.
Harris’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
This isn’t the first time Harris has faced such accusations. During his unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, Trump used Kiefer’s story to attack Harris and what he claimed was her support for “deadly sanctuary cities.”
“As District Attorney in San Francisco, Kamala placed a drug-dealing illegal immigrant in a jobs program instead of sending him to prison. Four months later, the illegal immigrant robbed a 29-year-old woman, ran her over with an SUV, fracturing her skull and ruining her life,” Trump said at an August 2020 campaign stop in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. “We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans, not criminal aliens.”
A “Red Pill Moment”
Since becoming the Democratic Party’s de facto nominee, Harris has avoided discussing the southwest border, which under the Biden administration saw unprecedented levels of migrant crossings before numbers began to decline in April.
According to Customs and Border Protection, its agents and officers have encountered more than 8.4 million migrants along the southwest border since the Biden administration took office, more than four times as many as under the Trump administration. Under Biden, an estimated 2 million more migrants have been detected but never captured.
But apprehension rates have declined significantly in the past two months after the Biden administration announced new asylum restrictions. Government statistics released last week show that migrant encounters along the southwest border have declined 55% since the restrictions went into effect, with June seeing the lowest number of border encounters of any month in the past three years.
Harris, for her part, has continued to push for progressive solutions on criminal justice and immigration control.
As for Kiefer, the violent assault she suffered was what she called her “red pill moment” – a reference to a pill in the movie “The Matrix” that gives users the ability to see harsh realities.
Kiefer, who called herself a liberal at the time, now says she supports Trump’s policies. Government records show she has supported other conservative efforts in recent years, donating small amounts to Republican causes 17 times since 2020.
Earlier this year, Trump touted his role in the Republican-led campaign to defeat a bipartisan Senate bill that his supporters said would have helped strengthen border security and immigration enforcement. Trump has portrayed the bill as a political play by Democrats.
Before Izaguirre was convicted in 2010, Harris reportedly gave his “full support and encouragement” for his deportation. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement records, Izaguirre was deported to Honduras in 2011.
ABC News’ Quinn Owen contributed to this report.
ABC News
