Illegal immigrants linked to vicious sex crimes expose poor vetting at U.S. border

A teen girl raped in broad daylight at a New York City park.

A preteen girl sexually assaulted and strangled to death in Houston.

A Maryland mother of five raped and fatally beaten while jogging on a wooded trail.

A series of brazen sex crimes have been tied to illegal immigrants, and national security experts say the rush to process droves of new arrivals at the U.S. southern border is providing cover for those with violent pasts.

It’s become a familiar pattern across the states: a woman or girl is victimized in a heinous crime, police nab a suspect, and the public learns the alleged perpetrator crossed into the U.S. illegally, sometimes as recently as a month earlier.

Border-entry policies are the first line of defense against such grim acts, but the Biden administration’s lenient protocols for migrants are resulting in hasty background checks that rarely uncover a person’s criminal history.

The dynamic allows criminals to come to the U.S. with a clean slate, and Americans are left to learn first-hand about their dangerous new neighbors.  

“I don’t think that people who rape later in life, that it’s their first time,” Todd Bensman, the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Times. “They probably did it where they’re coming from — maybe they served time in the country they’re coming from. It’s really a public safety vetting matter.”

Poor vetting is how the man accused of slaying 37-year-old Rachel Morin was able to get into the country.

Police in Harford County, Maryland, said Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez was wanted on murder charges in his native El Salvador and was affiliated with international gang MS-13.

But those facts weren’t detected when he entered the U.S. illegally in February 2023.

In August, authorities said the 23-year-old snatched Morin off a running trail, severely beat the woman, and then raped and killed her. The mother of five’s mutilated body was found in a drainage ditch the next day.

A 10-month manhunt ended in June when Mr. Hernandez was arrested in Oklahoma. Police also linked him to a Los Angeles home invasion during which a mother and her 9-year-old daughter were assaulted.

The Harford County Sheriff and Morin’s family both condemned the Biden administration’s de facto open-border policy for introducing criminals into the country.

“It’s like they’re pretending these immigration problems don’t exist and people aren’t being harmed and killed by their policies,” Patty Morin, Rachel’s mother, said in an appearance on Fox News.

The two illegal immigrants charged with killing 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray further catapulted the border policies onto the national stage.

Police said Jocelyn snuck out of her Houston home on June 16 and was later lured under a bridge by two men.

That’s where, authorities said, the two assailants tied her up, pulled off her pants and choked her to death. Her body was found in a bayou the morning after.

Police accused two Venezuelan nationals — Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26 — of killing the preteen.

To what degree Jocelyn was sexually assaulted is still under investigation, though prosecutors told the Houston Chronicle that Mr. Pena has acknowledged kissing the girl while claiming it was Mr. Martinez-Rangel who straddled and strangled her.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said prosecutors are pursuing capital-murder charges.

The two men in the case both crossed into the U.S. in the last three months, with Mr. Martinez-Rangel having been in the country only since late May.

The turnstile at the border is creating a big target on President Biden that former President Donald Trump has been eager to hit.    

“Twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was found strangled to death and dumped in a creek in Houston, allegedly murdered by two recent illegal border crossers from Venezuela,” Mr. Trump said at a recent conference in the District.

“These monsters should never have been in our country, and if I were president, they would not have been in our country. We had a strong border. We had protection,” he said.

Crimes against women and girls are enraging everyday Americans as well.

A group of angry New Yorkers tackled a man wanted in the rape of a 13-year-old girl after the residents spotted him on the street.

Police have charged Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Ecuador, with the rape in Queens, which occurred in broad daylight.

Authorities said the suspect held the girl and a 13-year-old boy who was with her at knifepoint before leading them into a secluded area of a park. The aggressor then tied both their hands and sexually assaulted the girl.

Police broadcast images of the suspect far and wide, which led to the citizen-led confrontation that ended with Mr. Inga-Landi’s arrest.

“When they saw him out on the street, they tried to detain him,” New York Police Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said this month. “They called 911, he began to fight back … and he suffered some minor injuries while the community was holding him.”

Mr. Bensman said the easiest way to prevent immigrants with criminal histories from coming into the U.S. is upping detention at the border so federal agents can do proper background checks. Or as he put it, “do what normal countries do.”

But he said the Biden administration is prioritizing holds for a small number of people, and has cut the number of beds available for border crossers altogether, so agents have no choice but to release illegal immigrants soon after they’re caught.

Still, some academics argue that focusing on crimes from immigrants is misleading and that they generally break the law at a lower rate than Americans do.

The most prominent research comes from a 2023 Stanford University study that showed first-generation immigrants are 60% less likely to be imprisoned than native-born Americans.

But Mr. Bensman called the research an “intellectually fraudulent, apples-to-rocks comparison.”

“We’re stuck with American citizens — we have to contend with our people,” Mr. Bensman told The Times. “But 100% of every murder, rape, molestation, child molestation, robbery, whatever it is … that illegals commit, were all unnecessary and preventable through vetting, detention and deportation.”