Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday the punishment for illegal immigrants who harm American citizens needs to be stricter, citing a specific case where a father and his two children were killed.
Courtney Hacking lost her husband and two daughters after Margarito Quintero Rosales fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into her family’s car. He was sentenced to just two years in prison for criminally negligent homicide. Paxton echoed Hacking’s call for harsher punishments to discourage illegal immigration on “Fox & Friends” Monday.
“I think our laws in Texas need to be stricter for this,” Paxton said. “We’ve been dealing with this for years. Dealing with sanctuary cities, trying to prevent people from coming into our country illegally. This is an area I think the legislature needs to address, because I don’t think the penalties are strong enough for people who commit these types of crimes.”
Paxton said there have been over 600,000 crimes in Texas related to illegal immigration, including thousands of sexual assaults and over a thousand homicides.
“We’ve had over six hundred thousand crimes including twelve hundred homicides. We’ve had six thousand sexual assaults and here we go again. How many of these stories do we have to have before we address this issue — and I am thankful that the president is making a significant impact here,” he said.
The Texas AG slammed the two-year sentence Rosales received, and said he was thankful President Donald Trump has changed federal policy to make securing the border easier.
“My problem is also that this is only a two year sentence. When you look at what happened to this woman, she lost both of her children. She lost her husband, and the remedy is really a two year sentence,” he said. “My state spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stop illegal immigration. We had our hands tied by the federal government and finally, we have a president that’s allowing border security and customs enforcement to do their job.”
“Illegal immigration is coming down dramatically and I think it’s a result of what this administration and what the Trump administration has sought to do,” Paxton concluded.
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