Less than two hours after President Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race last week, the Republican National Committee released a two-minute campaign ad targeting Vice President Kamala Harris. The ad criticized her as “dangerously liberal” and claimed she was lenient on illegal immigration before reaching the White House.
The ad highlighted a 2008 incident in San Francisco involving a woman who was attacked by a man in the country illegally. The attacker had been arrested earlier on drug charges but was released under a program initiated by Harris, who was then the city’s district attorney.
As Harris frames her campaign against former President Donald Trump as a choice between a tough prosecutor and a convicted felon, Amanda Kiefer, the victim of the 2008 assault, has criticized Harris’s message as “laughable.” Kiefer, now 45, spoke publicly about her experience for the first time in 15 years, telling ABC News, “When a policy negatively affects you, you wake up.”
According to the RNC ad, Harris “allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training” instead of prison. The program, called Back on Track, aimed to reduce recidivism by helping lower-level nonviolent offenders redirect their lives. Those who completed the program had their records expunged. However, Harris acknowledged a “flaw in the design” of the program, which allowed some illegal immigrants to participate even though they couldn’t legally work.
A spokesperson for Harris declined to comment on the record for this story.
In July 2008, when Kiefer was 29, she was walking in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood when 20-year-old Alexander Izaguirre stole her purse and jumped into a waiting SUV. The driver tried to run Kiefer down, fracturing her skull. “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 told ABC News.
Harris seemed to agree, telling the Los Angeles Times in 2009 that the program’s purpose was to help offenders obtain lawful employment. She admitted that illegal immigrants would not be able to fulfill this goal, contradicting the program’s spirit. “I believe we fixed it,” Harris said at the time, ensuring that only those who could legally work would enter Back on Track.
Fewer than a dozen undocumented immigrants participated in the program, which reportedly became a model for other law enforcement agencies. Nevertheless, Trump and his supporters are using Kiefer’s story to counter Harris’s tough-on-crime stance and perpetuate the false narrative that undocumented immigrants contribute significantly to crime. Statistics show that U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as people in the country illegally.
Harris’s campaign did not respond to ABC News’s request for comment.
This is not the first time Harris has faced such accusations. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Trump used Kiefer’s story to attack Harris and her alleged support for “deadly sanctuary cities.” He criticized her for putting a “drug-dealing illegal alien” into a jobs program instead of prison, leading to Kiefer’s assault.
Since becoming the Democratic party’s de-facto nominee, Harris has avoided discussing the Southwest border, which saw unprecedented levels of migrant crossings under the Biden administration. Customs and Border Protection reported over 8.4 million migrant encounters along the Southwest border since Biden took office, more than four times the number during the Trump administration. However, apprehension rates have dropped significantly in recent months after new asylum restrictions were implemented.
Harris continues to advocate for progressive solutions to criminal justice and immigration enforcement. For Kiefer, the assault she suffered was a “red pill moment,” a reference to “The Matrix” movie, signifying her realization of harsh realities. Once a self-professed liberal, Kiefer now supports Trump’s policies and has donated to Republican causes.
Before Izaguirre’s sentencing in 2010, Harris reportedly supported his deportation. Izaguirre was deported to Honduras in 2011, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement records.