Victim of 2008 attack on illegal immigrant now cited by Trump allies hits back at Harris

Less than two hours after President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race last week, the Republican National Committee released a two-minute campaign ad calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “dangerously liberal” and claiming she was “liberal on the issue of illegal immigration before she even reached the White House.”

The ad recounted the 2008 story of a San Francisco woman who was attacked by a man who was in the country illegally and had been arrested months earlier on drug charges but released under a new program created by Harris, then the city’s district attorney.

As Harris now tries to portray 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 attack, calls Harris’ message “ridiculous.”

“When a policy has a negative impact on you, wake up,” Keifer, now 45, told ABC News, speaking publicly about her experiences for the first time in 15 years.

According to the RNC complaint, Harris allowed “illegal immigrant drug dealers to get job training” instead of going to prison.

The program, called Back on Track, was touted as a “smart anti-crime initiative” that could reduce recidivism by giving less violent offenders a chance to turn their lives away from crime. Offenders who received job training and completed the program had their records expunged.

But when the Los Angeles Times first reported Kiefer’s story in 2009, Harris said the program had a “design flaw” – an unintended loophole in the law – that allowed offenders living in the country illegally to take part in job training and still remain free, even though they could not find work legally.

A spokesman for Harris declined to comment officially for this article.

“Most Americans would disapprove of this”

In July 2008, when Kiefer was 29, she was walking with a group of friends in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco when 20-year-old Alexander Izaguirre stole her purse and jumped into a waiting SUV. The driver of the vehicle then attempted to run over Kiefer, causing her skull to be fractured.

“If criminals were allowed to avoid going to prison to train for jobs they were not legally allowed to do, I think most Americans would disapprove,” Kiefer told ABC News.

Harris seemed to agree 15 years ago, telling the Los Angeles Times that “the point of the program is to find and keep legal employment” – and that someone in the country illegally “would probably not be able to do that, so it would go against the very spirit of the program.”

“I think we’ve fixed it,” Harris said of the legal loophole at the time. “Going forward, it’s about making sure no one enters Back on Track who can’t work legally.”

In total, fewer than a dozen undocumented immigrants were admitted into the program, which reportedly became a model for other law enforcement agencies across the country.

Yet Trump and his supporters are now trying to re-circulate Kiefer’s story to counter the vice president’s tough-on-crime stance and to fuel the false narrative that undocumented immigrants have contributed to a nationwide rise in crime, which contradicts statistics that show that native-born Americans are twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as people who are in the country illegally.

Harris’ campaign did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

This is not the first time Harris has faced such allegations. During his unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, Trump used Kiefer’s story to attack Harris and her alleged support for “deadly sanctuary cities.”

“As district attorney in San Francisco, Kamala put an illegal alien who was dealing drugs into a job creation program instead of prison. Four months later, the illegal alien robbed a 29-year-old woman, ran her over with an SUV, fracturing her skull and ruining her life,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, in August 2020. “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 shied away from discussions about the southwest border, which saw unprecedented migrant crossings under the Biden administration 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 at the southwest border since the Biden administration took office – more than four times the number encountered during the Trump administration. Under Biden, about 2 million more border crossers were reportedly detected but never caught.

But apprehension rates have dropped significantly over the past two months after the Biden administration announced new asylum restrictions. Government statistics released last week show that migrant encounters at the southwest border have dropped 55% since the restrictions went into effect. June saw the lowest number of border encounters of any month in the past three years.

Harris, for her part, continues to push for progressive solutions in both criminal justice and immigration enforcement.

Kiefer herself described the brutal attack as her “Red Pill moment” – a reference to a pill from the film “The Matrix” that gives its users the ability to see the harsh reality.

Kiefer, who described herself as a liberal at the time, says she now supports Trump’s policies. Government records show that she has supported other conservative efforts in recent years, and has donated small amounts to Republican causes 17 times since 2020.

Trump earlier this year touted his role in key Republicans’ rejection of a bipartisan Senate bill that his supporters said would have helped strengthen border security and immigration enforcement. Trump called the bill a political maneuver by Democrats.

Before Izaguirre’s conviction in 2010, Harris reportedly “fully supported” his deportation. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement records, Izaguirre was deported to Honduras in 2011.

ABC News’ Quinn Owen contributed to this report.