Two mothers whose children were killed by illegal immigrants will urge lawmakers on Tuesday to reverse President Obama’s immigration enforcement policies and crack down on sanctuary cities.
“When will you act on this?” Laura Wilkerson, whose son Joshua was murdered in 2010 by a high school classmate from Belize, plans to ask House Judiciary subcommittee members during Tuesday’s hearing. “Maybe it will take the loss of your child,” she said in her prepared remarks.
Wilkerson will appear alongside a Maryland sheriff and Michelle Root, whose daughter Sarah was killed in January by a drunk driver who was an illegal immigrant. The cases implicate sanctuary cities, the Department of Homeland Security’s response to the influx of unaccompanied Central American children on the southern border, and the enforcement priorities set by Obama’s 2014 executive orders.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to the 2014 orders on Monday, but that case is expected to result in a 4-4 split decision, an outcome that would prevent the implementation of the orders in some states and stoke an ongoing political debate over immigration.
Wilkerson intends to give a detailed, blow-by-blow account of her son’s murder. “I testified before the Senate last July, 2015 and told this story,” she’ll say after describing the killing. “Nothing has been done about it. People are dying as we speak from illegal alien criminals. Does anybody here know the number of people whom have died or been raped or brutalized since then? That answer is no. Why? Because the government has no clue who is here or what their intent is in being here.”
Immigrants will have an advocate at the hearing in United Methodist Church Bishop Minerva Carcano, who will lament the murders but warn against basing national policy on anecdotal evidence.
“I also pray for the members of this subcommittee,” Carcano said in her prepared remarks. “It is unjust to take isolated, tragic incidents and implicate millions of our undocumented community members. To implicate innocent men, women and children in actions they did not commit is not justice, and goes against our best values as Americans. I implore you to reject blind vengeance, which is neither restorative nor practical.”
But transnational gangs, strengthened by illegal immigration, are a growing problem in the United States, according to a Maryland sheriff. “There are over 75 active known validated transnational criminal gang members in Frederick County, many more suspected of gang affiliation,” Sheriff Charles Jenkins will testify. “Transnational alien gangs are structured criminal enterprises involved in drug and human trafficking, crimes of violence over turf, retaliation, money laundering, and other serious crime. As these gangs are recruiting locally and increasing in number, so does the associated crime within communities.”
Jenkins is a proponent of local police enforcing federal immigration laws, but Carcano argued that such cooperation discourages immigrants from reporting crimes and could undermine the religious liberty of Americans who want to help the immigrants. “Throughout all of Scripture, God’s people have provided refuge for persons who travel from foreign countries as well as persons who were held in slavery,” he wrote in his prepared statement. “Today, these same faith communities provide sanctuary for parents who are struggling to keep their families together, to stay with their children.”
Root, however, will protest that her daughter’s killer was released on a $5,000 bond — “Less than the amount it cost to bury my baby” — and subsequently fled after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials failed to have him detained.
“America is a nation of immigrants, legal immigrants,” Root wrote in her prepared testimony. “My family like many Americans holds no ill will to people who desire the American dream, we just ask that controls be put into place to control the entry and that they be documented and vetted through legal means so if such an incident were to occur again they could be held accountable and another family would not have to experience the pain and frustration that our family and Sarah’s friends have experienced.”
