There's no question Kate Steinle, who was killed while walking on a pier in San Francisco with her father last week, would still be alive if that city had a "anything close to a sensible sanctuary policy," former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Friday.
"I think you're going to find cities that have more sensible sanctuary policies than San Francisco," Giuliani told
Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "This thing in San Francisco is way off the charts.
"I never, back in my day, would have contemplated a sanctuary city that would have said a guy [who was] deported five times would be out of jail. If you're an illegal immigrant and arrested for a serious crime, you should have no bail because you're a risk of flight. There shouldn't be bail for you."
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Giuliani said the concept of "sanctuary cities," which allow municipalities to determine if they'll detain certain illegal immigrants wanted by federal authorities, has been around since the 1980s, but it's far different now than it was when Giuliani was a U.S. attorney in New York.
Another former New York mayor, Ed Koch, was the first to issue an executive order making New York a sanctuary city, said Giuliani, and with that, there were exceptions to the rule.
"One was with parents of schoolchildren," said Giuliani. "He didn't ask if they were illegal or not because he didn't want 40,000 children on the streets with no supervision."
There were also exceptions for crime witnesses or seriously ill people, said Giuliani, but as for everyone else, there were "strict orders to the police commissioner" that "every person be turned over."
Giuliani, though, said part of the problem while he was in office was that federal immigration officials would not take and deport more than 1,000 illegals a year.
"We had 400,000, which meant I was stuck with making the best of it," he said. "I would fight to put the drug dealers, murderers, rapists, first ... but sometimes the guy in the back of the restaurant would go first and [a] drug dealer would go on bail. Priorities for a long time have been extremely inconsistent."
But Giuliani said he would never have thought that a sanctuary city would have released someone like accused killer Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, who pleaded not guilty Tuesday to first-degree murder in last week's shooting. Sanchez told two television stations
he found the gun wrapped in a shirt on the pier.
Sanchez had recently been released from jail in San Francisco, despite his having been deported five times and his lengthy felony record.
"I never, back in my day, would have contemplated a sanctuary city would have said a guy deported five times would be out of jail," said Giuliani. "If you're an illegal immigrant and arrested for a serious crime, you should have no bail because you're a risk of flight. There shouldn't be bail for you."
He complained that the White House has no uniform rules on sanctuary cities, and "cities do what they want."
The best solution, he said, is a stronger border and increased border patrol measures.
"You've got to stop it there," said Giuliani. "Once it gets here, we're playing catch-up."