Todd Stewart should be alive today. The 68-year-old retiree was allegedly butchered on his own front lawn in Martinez, California, one day after a Newsom-appointed judge cut his accused killer loose — and now Tom Homan is putting the blame exactly where it belongs. President Trump’s border czar torched Gov. Gavin Newsom and California’s sanctuary regime Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” the New York Post reports.
“This person’s dead because Governor Newsom and the state of California puts politics — hatred of President Trump — over public safety,” Homan said. “It’s just politics, a sanctuary jurisdiction. Over a decade, I can think of the hundreds of cases like this that happened. It’s just one case after another after another.”
The alleged killer is Marcos Iriarte-Valdez, a 36-year-old illegal immigrant from Venezuela who has been in the United States since 2007. Surveillance video captured him pulling up to Stewart’s residential street in a Cadillac SUV — wearing a protective vest — before allegedly launching a vicious knife attack, continuing to stab the retiree even after he fell to the ground screaming. Police say the two men had no known connection.
Here’s the part Newsom doesn’t want you to focus on: Iriarte-Valdez was sitting in jail the day before the attack. A judge appointed by Newsom released him after he violated the terms of his home detention in a residential burglary case — despite an active ICE detainer. His rap sheet includes three counts of burglary, receiving stolen property, a DUI hit-and-run, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, and violating a protective order. Let that sink in.
“We did our job,” Homan said. “We located this person in their facility. We did an investigation, found out he is an illegal in the United States, has a criminal history, he is deportable, so we issued a detainer, asking them to notify us before they release him.” He added that nothing in California’s sanctuary law stops a deputy from picking up the phone: “You don’t have to hold him one minute longer than you would normally hold him.”
Newsom’s office responded by blaming — who else — the Trump administration, insisting the feds “should do their job instead of blaming California for ICE’s enforcement failures.” Of course they did. Iriarte-Valdez is now held on $1.1 million bail, facing a murder charge that a single phone call to ICE could have prevented.
This is a window into what happens when a state decides that spiting a president matters more than protecting a 68-year-old man watering his own front lawn. Sanctuary politics didn’t save anyone in Martinez — it delivered a killer to a quiet street with a knife and a protective vest. Americans deserve leaders who answer the phone when ICE calls.
Source: nypost.com