On Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015, Jamiel Shaw, Sr. testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee  on how his son, Jamiel Shaw, Jr., was killed by an illegal alien in 2008 harbored by the sanctuary city of Los Angeles.  As Investor's Business Daily reported:

Shaw was a Los Angeles high school star dreaming of a good life ahead when he was gunned down on March 2, 2008, while walking home. He was picked at random, police said, possibly as part of a gang loyalty test for the illegal alien who shot him.

Charged with the crime was Pedro Espinoza, who'd been released just hours earlier from Los Angeles County Jail where he spent four months for brandishing a firearm and resisting arrest. Espinoza is an illegal alien.

Shaw Sr. warned of the consequences of sanctuary cities harboring criminal illegal aliens and not deporting them, of not enforcing existing immigration laws, and of open borders:

"My son, Jamiel Shaw II, was murdered while walking on his own street, three houses down from his home. An illegal alien on his first gun charge was visiting a neighbor when my son was coming home," Shaw testified. "He shot my son in the stomach and then in the head, killing him."

Shaw then asked an obvious question: "Do black lives really matter? Or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or white policeman?"

Young Shaw's mother, Anita, now 50, was serving in Iraq when her son was murdered by an illegal alien gang-banger.  She thinks Kathryn Steinle's death, her son's murder, and too many other similar incidents prove that Donald Trump was right when he said our policy of open borders imports crime:

'It's amazing to me that the same incident is still going on today. It's like, when will the public wake up and do something.

'And this guy who is running for President, Donald Trump, he's trying to do something and they're trying to shut him down.

'I believe in what he's saying, he's trying to fix the borders and do all the things people should have done a long time ago.'

President Obama, who calls gay basketball players when they come out of the closet, has not as yet called Kathryn Steinle's father and family, just as he did not issue a statement at the time saying that if he had a son, he might look like Jamiel Shaw, Jr., which he said of Trayvon Martin after he was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.

The fact is that President Obama has unleashed a wave of criminal illegal aliens upon America.

Yes, there's a lot of crime in America.  We don't have to import any more of it, but that is exactly what we are doing, according to an account on Breitbart that documents the fact that there are some 347,000 criminal illegal aliens loose in the U.S.:

According to a March 2, 2015 "ICE Weekly Departures and Detention Report" obtained by Center for Immigration Studies expert Jessica Vaughan and shared with Breitbart News, there were 168,680 convicted criminal immigrants who had final orders of removal but who remained at large in the U.S.

Another 179,018 convicted criminal immigrants with deportation cases pending also remained at large. ...

In 2013 the Obama administration released 36,007 criminal immigrants who had nearly 88,000 convictions. Those convictions included 193 homicide convictions, 426 sexual assault convictions, 303 kidnapping convictions, and 1,075 aggravated assault convictions.

President Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos last November that "we're not in the business of deporting millions of people or breaking up families," but the joke is that he was talking about gang families.  Among those who have entered the country illegally are members of Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the infamous international street gang.

Many commentators, mostly on the left but including talking heads on Fox News like Juan Williams and Geraldo Rivera, claim that illegal aliens commit crimes at a rate lower than American citizens.  That is debatable, but they miss the point entirely, which is that the crime rate for illegal aliens should be zero since none of them should be here in the first place.  American citizens like Kathryn Steinle and Jamiel Shaw, Jr. should be alive today.

So would the son of Donald Rosenberg be alive today if he hadn't been run into while riding his motorcycle by an illegal alien who had made an illegal left turn in 2010, then ran over him three times as he tried to flee the scene.  Rosenberg, who describes himself as a "lifelong, very liberal Democrat," calculated that his son was among 3,000 Americans killed by illegal aliens in car crashes in 2010.  In a letter quoted by the Washington Times that he wrote to President Obama, Rosenberg said:

My son and all of the others are considered collateral damage in the quest for votes and campaign contributions[.] ... Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime."

Indeed, it is not, and the question asked by many families like the Shaws, the Steinles, and the Rosenbergs is, wasn't America supposed to be our sanctuary?

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.