Victim of 2008 Undocumented Immigrant Attack Now Cited by Trump Allies Hits Harris

Less than two hours after President Joe Biden announced it last week decision to leave of the 2024 presidential race, the Republican National Committee released a two-minute campaign ad that called Vice President Kamala Harris “dangerously liberal” and claimed that she “was liberal on illegal immigration before she came to the White House.”

The ad highlighted 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 which was published as part of a new program that had been launched by Harris. then the city's district attorney.

Now, as Harris tries to frame his campaign against the former president donald trump as a choice between a tough prosecutor and a convicted felon, 2008 assault victim Amanda Kiefer calls Harris' message “laughable.”

“When a policy affects you negatively, you wake up,” Keifer, now 45, told ABC News, speaking about his experience publicly for the first time in 15 years.

According to the RNC announcement, Harris “allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training” instead of prison.

The program, called Back on Track, was billed as a “smart on crime” initiative that could reduce recidivism rates by empowering lower-level, nonviolent offenders to redirect their lives away from crime. Offenders who received job training and completed the program had their records expunged.

But as Harris told the Los Angeles Times when the paper first highlighted Kiefer's story in 2009, there was a “design flaw” in the show, an unintended loophole, that allowed the authors who they were in the country receiving the job illegally. training and remain free, although they could not legally obtain a job.

A spokesman for Harris declined to comment on the record for this story.

“Most Americans would disapprove”

In July 2008, when Kiefer 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 attempted to run over Kiefer, leaving her with a fractured skull.

“If people who committed crimes could stay out of prison to train for jobs that they legally couldn't do, I think most Americans would disapprove of that,” Kiefer told ABC News.

Harris seemed to agree with this even 15 years ago, telling the Los Angeles Times at the time that “the whole point of the show [was] … to obtain and maintain legal employment” – and that someone in the country illegally “probably would not be able to do so, so it would go against the very spirit of the program.”

“I think we fixed it,” Harris said of the rift at the time. “So moving forward, it's about making sure that no one gets into Back on Track if they can't have a legal job.”

In all, fewer than a dozen undocumented immigrants entered the program, which reportedly became a model for other law enforcement agencies across the country.

Still, Trump and his supporters are now trying to reintroduce Kiefer's story to counter the vice president's tough stance on crime and fuel false narrative that undocumented immigrants have contributed to an increase in crime across the country, contradicting statistics showing that US-born citizens are more than twice as likely be arrested for violent crimes than people who are in the country illegally.

Harris' campaign did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

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

“As San Francisco's District Attorney, Kamala put an illegal alien who was dealing drugs in a work program instead of prison. Four months later, the illegal alien robbed a 29-year-old woman years ago, he cut her with an SUV and fractured her skull and ruined 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 shied away from talking about the Southwest border, which under the Biden administration saw unprecedented levels of migrant crossings before the numbers began to fall. come down 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 the amount during the Trump administration. Under Biden, more than 2 million people crossing the border were detected but never caught.

But attention rates have dropped significantly in the past two months after the Biden administration announced new asylum restrictions. Government statistics released last week show migrant encounters along the south-west border fell by 55% since the restrictions came into force, with June seeing the lower number of border encounters of any month in the last three years.

Harris, meanwhile, has continued to push for progressive solutions to both criminal justice and immigration enforcement.

For Kiefer, the violent assault he suffered was what he called his “red pill moment,” a reference to a pill in the movie “The Matrix” that gives users the ability to see harsh realities.

Kiefer, who was a self-proclaimed liberal at the time, says he now supports Trump's policies. Government records show he has supported other conservative efforts in recent years, donating small amounts of dollars to Republican causes 17 times since 2020.

Trump earlier this year touted his role in pushing key Republicans to defeat one bipartisan Senate bill which supporters say would have helped strengthen border security and immigration enforcement. Trump described the bill as a political ploy by Democrats.

Before Izaguirre's sentencing in 2010, Harris lent him “encouragement and full support” to his deportation. According immigration and Customs records, Izaguirre was deported to Honduras in 2011.

ABC News' Quinn Owen contributed to this report.