Hours before President Donald Trump showcased the stark differences between the parties on the issue of illegal immigration, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) invited Angel Families to speak about the dangers posed by years of America’s open borders.
“We need help,” Angel Mom Boni Driskill said, while flanked by RSC members. “I see other families who lose their loved ones in the most horrific ways, over and over and over, everything from rape, homicide, any other ugly thing you can imagine. Why do we have to keep seeing this? It’s like a revolving door. Those borders need to be closed. People need to be arrested or sent back to the country of their origin, where they have prisons for them.”
During Trump’s historic State of the Union (SOTU) address, he announced that February 22 will be National Angel Family Day, which “honors the families who have suffered the loss of a loved one due to crimes committed by illegal immigrants,” as Rep. Stephanie Bice (R., Okla.) noted.
The contrast between Trump’s time in the White House and that of President Joe Biden was something that multiple lawmakers emphasized. “We were here during the Biden years, where our border was wide open for no reason at all except politics, and it was politics of the worst kind, politics that wanted to allow for more than 10 million illegal aliens to come into this country so that Democrats could have new voters and that they can play with our census and all kind of other crazy stuff,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.) said. “We had young girls and young boys have their lives snuffed and taken away from them because of the radical Democratic Left policies, policies, by the way, that they still support today.”
As a border state representative, Rep. Brandon Gill (R., Texas) saw the consequences of Biden’s open border firsthand. “The Left’s open borders were most stingingly, a part of a deliberate policy to influence our elections, even at the expense of American families, an attempt to flood our country with illegal aliens, to distort congressional Representation, to provide a pathway for them to vote, all part of a political program that was not just deeply cynical, but absolutely grotesque, and the American people rejected it,” he added during the RSC’s press conference.
Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas), Gill’s fellow Texan, thanked the Angel Moms for sharing their stories — and while he too represents a border state, he remarked that “these ladies have articulated better than I could.”
The “bedlam at the border,” Roy continued, “was purposeful, and you can’t even put into words how people who are supposed to lead a country would do that to their own people. But that is what has happened.” Unlike Biden, Trump “has secured the border,” he said. “When they said that we needed legislation to secure it. No, we didn’t. We needed a leader who would do it and would follow the law. The president secured the border. The president is now removing bad actors. And what does the left want to do? They want to side with the people that are coming here and creating harm. It’s unconscionable.”
One of the points that several speakers noted was that the dangers of an open border extend well beyond traditional border states. Sandy Snodgrass, another Angel Mom who spoke, spoke about how cartels are “sending more deadly fentanyl and more deadly combinations of fentanyl analogs into this country, carfentanil, ten times stronger than regular fentanyl, mass poisoning in Anchorage, Alaska, late November.”
“This fight is far from over,” Snodgrass continued, “and I will not stop fighting every time, every chance I get to talk about fentanyl and what the Chinese Communist Party is doing, what drug terrorist organizations, mostly out of Mexico, are doing to our country, intentionally killing our citizens, inside our sovereign bout, inside our sovereign borders, is not okay, And I know that President Trump feels the same two weeks after I was in his office when he signed Bruce’s Law.”
That legislation was named after Snodgrass’s son, Bruce Snodgrass, who died from a synthetic opioid overdose; among other initiatives, it created a new Community-Based Coalition Enhancement Grant program focused on youth-based prevention efforts.
Donalds echoed Snodgrass’s point about Trump’s success at cracking down on illegal immigration, saying that “Donald Trump has done the job he was elected to do. He secured the border. He shut it down on day one. Now we’re going through the hard work of having to deport criminal illegal aliens and other illegal aliens out of the United States.”
The Republican lawmakers were thanked for their work by Angel Moms, like Agnes Gibboney, who told them that “no parent should ever have to go to a cemetery to celebrate their child’s birthday, like I do for almost 24 years.”
“Last month was my son’s 53rd birthday,” Gibboney said, “and it’s horrible to take a little cake to to put on a grave site, to put a candle and wish my son happy birthday, not even be able to buy him a gift for his birthday, and just wonder what would life have been.”
Other lawmakers present with the Angel Families were Reps. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.), Abe Hamadeh (R., Ariz.), Brian Babin (R., Texas), Mary Miller (R., Ill.), and Buddy Carter (R., Ga.).