DONALD TRUMP THINKS HE'S FOUND YET ANOTHER WILLIE HORTON

UPDATE, SATURDAY, 7/11: Jamiel Shaw, Sr., will introduce Trump at his rally in Phoenix tonight. The post below, from Wednesday, explains why this is happening.

Donald Trump is trying to turn Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the undocumented immigrant charged with the July 1 murder of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco, into a "new Willie Horton" (as Paul Waldman puts it).

But Trump isn't resting -- he seems to have found yet another Horton. Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft reports that Trump said this on Dana Loesch's radio show this afternoon:

“I’m in Los Angeles this weekend and I’m going to meet with Mr. Shaw [Jamiel Shaw, Sr., whose son was murdered by an illegal alien.]”

Hoft adds:

Jamiel Shaw’s testified before Congress in February after his son was killed by an illegal alien.

His son, Jamiel Andre Shaw II, was murdered by an Obama DREAMer.

An Obama DREAMer killed young Jamiel Shaw? That's how National Review's Joel Gehrke explained the case when he wrote about the elder Shaw's congressional testimony earlier this year:

A man whose son was murdered by a person enrolled in the deferred action for childhood arrivals program that President Obama established unilaterally in 2012 called for the FBI to start tracking crimes committed by people in the country illegally.

“My son, Jamiel Andre Shaw II, was murdered by a DREAMer, a DACA recipient, a child brought to this country by no fault of his own,” Mr. Shaw told Representative Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) while testifying before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee panel.

But, Gehrke goes on to contradict the assertion he's just made -- in fact, the murder took place before Obama was president, although Gehrke seems to regard this as a mere technicality:

Shaw was murdered in 2008, before the Obama created the DACA program in the run up to the 2012 election cycle, but -- as a young person brought into the country as a child, Shaw’s eventual murderer would likely have qualified for DACA status.

So the murderer, whose name is Pedro Espinoza, wasn't a DREAMer, but he would have been a DREAMer if he'd committed the murder when Obama was president, so the murder is basically Obama's fault. Damn you, Kenyan!

In fact, Espinoza had a criminal history -- one report says he had "an extensive juvenile record along with one adult conviction." He was released from jail on a gun charge the day before he committed the murder. In establishing the DACA program, the Obama administration said that in order to be eligible one must "have not been convicted of a felony offense, a significant misdemeanor, or more than three misdemeanors of any kind" and "not pose a threat to national security or public safety."

So Espinoza is not the sort of young person the program was intended for. But that hasn't stopped the right from using the murder of Shaw as a club to beat Obama with. The right also likes the fact that Shaw was African American, and his father turned a social-justice slogan on its head in his congressional testimony:

“My son, Jamiel Andre Shaw II, was murdered by a DREAMer, a DACA recipient, a child brought to this country by no fault of his own,” Shaw began. “My family’s peace and freedom was stolen by an illegal alien from Mexico. He was brought here by his illegal alien parents and allowed to grow up as a wild animal.”

He continued: “Some people believe that if you are brought over by no fault of your own that it makes you a good person. They want you to believe that DREAM Act kids don’t murder. I am here to debunk that myth.” ...

“Do black lives really matter? Or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or a white policeman?” Shaw asked.

Recently, Jamiel Shaw's father and mother have been quoted in the press praising Trump:

Anita Shaw, whose 17-year-old boy Jamiel Jr was murdered by gang member Pedro Espinoza in Los Angeles in 2008, says she is 'angry' at the current immigration policy.

She told Daily Mail Online: 'It makes me sad, it makes me angry, it makes me frustrated....

'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.'

So Trump is going to try to exploit this case, too, for political gain.

What's absurd about this is that it's predicated on the notion that immigrants are inherently lawless, in a way that native-born Americans aren't. But L.A. is a city with quite a few violent residents who were born here. The problem with violent crime is violent crime; it's not immigration.

That's not the message you'll hear, though, as Trump extends his Immigration Demagoguery tour into the weekend.

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I'll add that I'm not quite ready to accept the theory, advanced by the L.A. Weekly and a site called StreetGangs.com, that Jamiel Shaw himself was a member of a gang. It does seem clear that he had friends who were in a Blood gang, and he was wearing a lot of red (a Blood color, of course) at the time of his murder. Shaw's parents vehemently deny that he was in a gang, and the L.A. Times has also declared that he wasn't a gang member. But this just makes he point that the violence in this case was about gangs, not about immigration. The gang he may or may not have been a member of was a non-immigrant gang. For that matter, the gang to which his murderer blonged is believed to be 5%-10% undocumented.