Mother of murder victim scolds Biden, Harris for silence about illegal immigrant crime

Rachel Morin’s slaying in August 2023 — authorities say she was dragged off a hiking trail and then beaten, raped and killed by Salvadoran migrant — has been ignored by the White House for more than a year, the victim’s mother told lawmakers Wednesday.

“Since we learned that it was an illegal immigrant that they’ve accused of murdering her, the Biden-Harris administration has not reached out to our family to offer condolences,” Patty Morin testified on Capitol Hill.

The grisly killing of the Maryland mother of five, allegedly at the hands of a migrant with MS-13 ties, elicited bipartisan sympathy from lawmakers at the otherwise testy congressional hearing about the border.

Ms. Morin said the silence from President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the Democratic presidential nominee, is an admission that there is a problem at the border, especially as it relates to immigrants who are in the country illegally committing heinous crimes.

In June, immigrants without documentation were accused of raping a teen girl in New York City and sexually assaulting and killing a preteen girl in Houston. Also this summer, Oklahoma police arrested Morin’s suspected killer, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, following a 10-month investigation.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed that the crimes, while horrific, are not the norm for the millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally. However, lawmakers disagreed about how to protect Americans from the most vicious criminals among the migrants.

Republicans sided with retired Chief Border Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke, who testified about the “large-scale lapse in our ability to return people to their country of origin.”

He said sections of the border were left vacant for months at a time, and the agency had “no idea who and what entered our country over this time.” He also said the number of detention beds has been reduced, limiting the ability to hold and vet people who enter the country illegally.

Mr. Heitke further said interactions with Significant Interest Aliens, who are undocumented immigrants with links to terrorist groups, went up exponentially under the Biden-Harris administration.

The 25-year veteran with Border Patrol said that San Diego only averaged about 10 to 15 SIA arrests per year before Mr. Biden took office. Once he assumed the White House, that number shot up to over 100 in 2022 and has increased ever since.

Mr. Heitke said he was instructed not to discuss any of these arrests while he was on active duty.

“So purposeful policies, wreaking havoc on a community, and we’ll just hide it — perfect, thank you,” said Chairman Mark Green, Tennessee Republican.

Democrats countered that Republicans haven’t signed on to previous border bills, including a bipartisan bill that died in the Senate this spring.

Sheriff David Hathaway, who works in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, which borders Mexico, said during his testimony that some Republican proposals to thwart illegal immigration are racist.

“There was never a proposal to build a wall on the northern border, on the Canadian border. There was never any intent to aggressively enforce Title 42 on the Canadian border,” he said. “There is this kind of racist component to it that we kind of all ignore, but it’s there smoldering in the background.”