President Donald Trump’s Super PAC America First Policies has launched a seven-figure ad buy targeting several top Democrats in Congress with a message from Angel Mom Michelle Root, whose daughter Sarah was murdered by an illegal alien in 2016.
The digital ad buy, Breitbart News has learned, is part of a broader $1.1 million campaign that will target key lawmakers in states across the country, specifically in Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Alabama, urging constituents in those states to call their representatives and senators to push for funding for President Trump’s planned wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
The digital ads include specific phone numbers for people in those states to call their senators and representatives, like Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) of Alabama or Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) of Ohio, among others.
The ad features Michelle Root, whose daughter Sarah was killed by an illegal alien in early 2016. Here is the video of the ad that is airing across digital platforms–an ad that previously aired in television buys late last year:
It has been repurposed for digital distribution across Facebook and other social media platforms for the buy zoning in on the wall negotiations as a bipartisan bicameral conference committee begins discussions this week after the longest government shutdown in history ended late last week. The government is open until Feb. 15–a 21-day-long reprieve after Trump went to the mattresses to secure wall funding but Democrats blocked him–at which point if there is no deal to keep government open there may be another shutdown.
Democrat leadership on Capitol Hill has flatly refused to fund Trump’s wall, but some rank-and-file Democrats across the House and Senate conferences have broken with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying they would be open to funding a wall. Clearly, this new ad push from America First Policies is aiming its significant financial firepower at exacerbating those Democrat splits amid these negotiations.
The story of Sarah Root’s untimely death at the hands of an illegal alien is a particularly powerful one in illustrating the dangers of unfettered illegal immigration. The Washington Post, in a summer 2016 piece on her killing, described the night she died as such:
It was four in the morning on Jan. 31 when Scott Root received the call every parent dreads, summoning him to a hospital in Omaha, Neb., about an accident involving his 21-year-old daughter Sarah, but not telling him then, over the phone, just how dreadful it was.
“I thought we had to deal with a broken leg or a broken arm,” he would later say before a congressional committee. “I didn’t dare to think the worst.”
Only when he arrived was he informed of her condition. “Her spinal cord was snapped and her skull fractured in two places,” he said. Her chances of recovery, the neurosurgeon told him, were zero. Her face, he said, was swollen beyond recognition.
He had been summoned not to comfort his daughter but to identify her.
“We identified her by her tattoo on her rib cage ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ and a crucifix . … Her mother and I kept her on life support three days to allow organ recipients and their doctors to prepare themselves for harvesting.”She had been out that night and morning celebrating her graduation from Bellevue University, near Omaha, with friends. As she stopped at a light in her white Oldsmobile Bravada SUV, a Chevy pickup driving at a high rate of speed slammed into her, ramming the SUV and sending it about 800 feet along the road, crushing it so badly that the rear and front of the car had become fused.
Police would later determine that the truck’s driver was street racing and drunk, according to the Des Moines Register.
The driver of the pickup, identified by police as Eswin G. Mejia, was brought to the same hospital and then transferred to the Douglas County Jail. His blood alcohol content was 0.241, the Register reported, three times the legal limit. Later that day, he was charged with motor vehicular homicide.
In the ad that America First is airing, Root’s mother names her daughter’s killer Edwin Mejia. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Most Wanted website, Mejia remains at-large on the run from authorities after he killed Sarah Root.
“Subject is a 19-year old citizen of Honduras, an at-large illegal alien, currently wanted for motor vehicle homicide,” ICE’s Most Wanted website posting on Mejia says. “In 2016, Mejia was arrested for felony driving under the influence of liquor, after he struck a vehicle that allegedly caused the death of a young woman. He unlawfully entered the U.S. in 2013 and despite numerous attempts by ICE to locate his whereabouts, he currently remains at-large.”
ICE includes a warning that Mejia, like other subjects listed on its Most Wanted section, is considered dangerous and the public should not attempt to apprehend him but instead notify authorities if they see him.
Michelle Root’s plea to the public is that America sees the effects of illegal immigration.
“I want the American people to see what devastation illegal aliens cause,” she says in the America First Policies ad…. “My separation is permanent. I want to see that wall built.”