EXCLUSIVE — A Virginia woman is suing the Biden administration for $100 million in a wrongful death lawsuit that blames the Department of Homeland Security for the murder of her daughter after Border Patrol agents allegedly released an unaccompanied minor from custody despite his alleged ties to MS-13, the Washington Examiner has learned.
Tammy Nobles, a witness who will appear Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee in its second impeachment hearing of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, said in a phone call Tuesday that she has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the DHS. Nobles’s suit stems from what she described as the preventable rape and strangulation of her autistic daughter last summer, 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton.
“It just makes me angry that this could have been prevented if they could have done their job down at the border. If they would have done their job then we wouldn’t be here right now doing this,” Nobles said.
Attorney Brian Claypool of Pasadena, California-based Claypool Law Firm filed the case against the DHS this month.
Nobles said the lawsuit would also include the Department of Health and Human Services because she alleged the department did not verify the adult sponsor to whom it released the suspect from the border.
Nobles is scheduled to appear before the House committee on Thursday morning as a witness in a hearing about the impacts of the border crisis.
“They invited me to come and testify. I’m really glad they did,” Nobles said. “I get to tell her story — get as many people to hear her story.”
The unnamed suspect, whose identity was protected as a 17-year-old at the time, was indicted in early 2023 by a grand jury in Maryland for 11 charges in the July 27, 2022, homicide of Hamilton, including first-degree murder, robbery, and rape. He will be tried as an adult.
“Everyone should know how he got here — all the people involved that led up to her death. I think they all should be responsible,” Nobles said in her first at-length interview about the loss of her eldest daughter with the Washington Examiner last year. “She was just a happy little girl that wanted to live life, and it was taken. She wasn’t doing anything. She had two jobs. She was trying to figure out life being autistic.”
Local police in Aberdeen, Maryland, previously confirmed that the suspect illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and was apprehended by federal Border Patrol agents in Rio Grande City, Texas, in March 2022. It is unclear if he was in a gang at the time, whether he was on the radar of federal authorities, or if a background screening was done when he entered the United States. The Aberdeen Police Department confirmed the suspect’s MS-13 affiliation to the Washington Examiner last year.
MS-13 is one of the vilest organized crime organizations in the world, and members caught at the border are ineligible to seek asylum and will be held in custody until deportation.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, did not disclose in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner last February if it had screened the suspect at the border or what type of screening he went through.
“CBP screens migrants utilizing a range of criteria and methods that are law enforcement sensitive,” according to a statement from CBP. “Methods for assessing the validity of migrants’ age include the collection of biometric and biographic information such as fingerprints, photos, phone numbers, addresses, and documentation provided by migrants or government agencies. Identification and age determination are also determined through background investigations, agent interviews, and consulate verification.”
The suspect is one of 456,000 unaccompanied children who have come across the southern border since President Joe Biden’s first full month in office, according to publicly available federal data.
The influx of children without parents has put an enormous strain on border officials, who have been pushed to process and transfer children to HHS, in which a social worker finds a sponsor in the U.S. to release the child to as quickly as possible.
After he was apprehended at the border in March 2022, he identified a woman in Frederick, Maryland, as his aunt, police said.
The suspect went to live with the woman and then moved in with a half-brother in Aberdeen, the charging documents stated.
Nobles said police told her that the suspect’s half-brother connected him with a woman who sublet rooms within mobile homes. Two days before Hamilton’s birthday, the suspect moved into the vacant third bedroom of their shared mobile home, according to police.
On July 27, 2022, Hamilton came home from an overnight shift at work and went to sleep in her bedroom as her boyfriend left for work.
Early that evening, Hamilton’s boyfriend returned home and entered the bedroom, where he found her deceased. He called the police, who arrived on the scene and called Hamilton’s mother within minutes. Police told Nobles that the injuries Hamilton had sustained were consistent with homicide.
Hamilton had been strangled to death with a phone charging cord wound around her neck, according to police. She had called her boyfriend at the time of the incident, and the call went to voicemail, Nobles and police said. The voicemail recorded Hamilton’s strangulation.
“It was him strangling her,” Nobles said. “Two minutes and 30 seconds.”
Nobles said that in the days before her daughter’s death, Hamilton had complained to her boyfriend about the new roommate smoking marijuana outside the trailer, and her boyfriend had told her not to say anything to the stranger. Police have not revealed what may have triggered the attack against Hamilton.
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Hamilton’s case has been delayed in court and is expected to begin in June.
The DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
