The verdict was handed down yesterday:

From the start of his trial Monday, there was no question that Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia brutally stabbed Vanessa Pham, bringing a “young life to a horrific end,” as one prosecutor said. After hearing four days of testimony and deliberating for about three hours, a Fairfax County jury convicted Blanco Garcia of first-degree murder, which could put him in prison for the rest of his life. To win the first-degree murder conviction, jurors had to be convinced that the killing was premeditated.

Hopefully, the outcome of the trial will bring some comfort and closure to Pham’s friends and family.

But there won’t be full justice until the open-borders policies that enabled Blanco Garcia are put to a stop.

***

ICYMI my column last week:

The illegal alien murderer of Vanessa Pham

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2013

Why is gun control the only policy we’re allowed to discuss when horrific murders occur? In the liberal mindset, “root causes” of crime begin and end with the Second Amendment. But who pays the price when our public guardians fail to secure our borders, refuse to deport serial criminal offenders, and enable drug-crazed menaces to prey upon innocent citizens?

Meet 27-year-old Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia. An illegal alien from Guatemala, he has lived and worked in Fairfax County, Va., for at least 11 years. The region is a notorious “sanctuary” for immigration law-breakers where elected officials and big business look the other way for cheap labor and cheap votes.

When he wasn’t working illegally as a construction worker in the government-fueled Boomtown ‘burb or getting himself high on drugs, Blanco-Garcia was building up a lengthy rap sheet. According to Fairfax County court records cited by the Fairfax City Patch.com, Blanco-Garcia has been arrested for:

–Public swearing/intoxication in March 2010.

–Petit larceny in September 2011.

–Concealment/Price alteration of merchandise in April 2012.

With the feds granting blanket amnesty waivers by administrative fiat and refusing to fix the deportation abyss, coupled with brazen “don’t ask, don’t tell” sanctuary policies by local officials, Blanco-Garcia managed to escape detention and deportation for more than a decade. In December 2012, the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force (which includes U.S. Marshals staff, Fairfax County police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and D.C. fugitive operations officers) finally caught up with Blanco-Garcia. They detained him after determining “that he was in violation of U.S. immigration law.”

But it was too late for 19-year-old college freshman Vanessa Pham. In July 2010, the bubbly art student’s decision to be a Good Samaritan to open-borders beneficiary Blanco-Garcia cost her life. After getting her nails done at a Fairfax Plaza salon, she encountered the illegal alien and his infant daughter in the parking lot. Blanco-Garcia was strung out on $400 worth of PCP.

ORDER IT NOW

According to prosecutors, he asked Pham to take him to the hospital. She let the man and his baby into her car. When Pham took a wrong turn, Blanco-Garcia turned on her — stabbing her more than a dozen times with a knife he was carrying. She veered into a ditch; he coldly wiped her blood off of his hands with a baby wipe and clambered out of the sunroof with the child.

Cops found the blade of the murder weapon, with the killer’s DNA, under Pham’s seat. But for nearly three years, her friends and family agonized as the DNA remained unidentified and the case unsolved. The investigative break? Illegal alien Blanco-Garcia continued his criminal havoc — surprise, surprise — and attempted to steal several bottles of champagne from a local grocery store. He was convicted of larceny in April 2012. By December, law enforcement had tied his fingerprints to Pham’s murder. Blanco-Garcia’s trial begins next week.

True to form, the whitewash media have ignored Blanco-Garcia’s immigration status and the public policy implications of our government’s systemic, bipartisan refusal to enforce the laws already on the books. The Washington Post (which employed illegal alien reporter turned amnesty activist Jose Antonio Vargas for years and glorified the amnesty mob marches in 2006 and 2007) conveniently failed to mention Blanco-Garcia’s illegal alien status. Some crimes are more equal than others.

According to immigration activists pushing to grant Guatemala “temporary protected status” — a de facto amnesty program run by the Department of Homeland Security that confers permanent residency, taxpayer subsidies and preferential employment treatment to line-jumpers, border-crossers and visa overstayers — there are approximately 1.7 million Guatemalans in the U.S. A whopping 60 percent of them, like Blanco-Garcia, are here illegally.

That’s on top of the jaw-dropping backlog of 500,000-plus fugitive deportees who had their day in immigration court, were ordered to leave the country and then were released and absconded into the ether.

And that’s on top of 1 million-plus visa holders whom the feds have lost track of because Congress never bothered to fulfill its legislative mandate to create a functioning entry-exit system — something Washington has promised to do six times over the past 17 years.

The horrific murder of Vanessa Pham was 100 percent preventable. Blanco-Garcia never should have been here in the first place. After each encounter with law enforcement, he should have been detained, deported and kept out. For good.

I repeat: We spend billions of dollars on homeland security, but our government can’t even track and deport repeat convicted criminal aliens. These are not the well-meaning “newcomers” who just want to “pursue economic opportunities” by “doing the jobs no one else will do.” These are foreign-born thugs, druggies, sex offenders, murderers and repeat drunk drivers who are destroying the American Dream.

If our immigration and entrance system cannot effectively monitor, detain and kick out known American Destroyers, how can amnesty-peddling politicians in either party be trusted to provide for the common defense of law-abiding citizens pursuing the American Dream?