Angel Moms whose children were murdered by illegal aliens or poisoned by fentanyl are calling for the rapid confirmation of Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Several Angel Moms provided Breitbart News with powerful statements in support of Noem and urged a swift confirmation process.
Tammy Nobles is the mother of slain 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton, who was bound, raped, and strangled to death with a phone cord by an illegal alien MS-13 gang member in July 2022 in Aberdeen, Maryland.
“My beautiful daughter Kayla had just turned 20 years old only three days before her life was taken by an illegal alien who should never have been allowed into the country,” Nobles said in a statement to Breitbart News. “He should have been easily identified as a member of the MS-13 gang with a criminal record in El Salvador, but he got in.”
Hamilton’s murderer, Walter Javier Martinez, now 19, pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Hamilton and is serving a 70-year prison term, as Breitbart News reported. The Biden-Harris adminsitration resettled Martinez into the United States as an Unaccompanied Alien Child months before he murdered Hamilton.
Prosecutors also found a letter Martinez penned awaiting trial, detailing four murders and two rapes he committed in El Salvador.
“He made his way to Maryland and raped and murdered my baby,” Nobles emphasized. “We need people in charge who will fix the system that allows monsters like this to kill American citizens. We need Gov. Noem as Secretary and we need the whole Trump team in place.”
Anne Fundner also calls on the Senate to quickly install Noem as DHS secretary. Fundner’s 15-year-old son Weston was tragically killed in a fentanyl poisoning in Orange County, California, in February 2022.
Fundner testified before Congress that under “heavy peer pressure” and believing the substance was something other than fentanyl, her high school freshman son ingested the deadly drug, which is often trafficked through the U.S.-Mexico border. Weston’s father found his body the next day in his bedroom.
“We’ve seen what happens when our elected officials purposely weaken our border because of political ideology. People die and families are devastated,” Fundner said in a statement to Breitbart News. “My gifted and talented 15-year-old son was an innocent casualty of the failure to enforce our laws, and of the callous indifference to the flood of poisonous drugs flooding across the border.”
“Weston gave into peer pressure – just once was enough – and took one pill he didn’t know was laced with fentanyl,” Fundner continued. “It is imperative that Gov. Noem and the rest of President Trump’s national security team are confirmed at the earliest opportunity. They have to fix this so that other families don’t suffer what we’ve suffered.”
A third Angel Mom, Agnes Gibboney — whose 29-year-old son, Ronald Da Silva, was murdered by a previously deported illegal alien gang member in El Monte, California, in 2002 — also called for the quick confirmation of Noem and the rest of Trump’s team.
“My son was just standing in a friend’s driveway when he was killed by a bullet fired by an illegal alien shooting at someone else,” she told Breitbart News in a statement. “The murderer was a known gang member who had already been deported at least once, but had returned to the country illegally.”
Ronald had been speaking to his neighborhood friend Robert — who the Federation for American Immigration Reform notes was the intended target of the shooting — when he was fatally shot by Luis Gonzalez-Valencia.
“When I got to the hospital, they wouldn’t let me hold him, and all I could do was bang on a window to try to get him to open his eyes,” Gibboney told Breitbart News.
Gonzalez-Valencia was convicted on a voluntary manslaughter charge in 2003 and ultimately was deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) during the Trump administration in November 2019.
“California authorities honored the detainer and turned the prisoner over to ERO officers at the Calipatria State Prison,” Breitbart News Texas’s Bob Price noted at the time.
Gibboney told Breitbart News, “We’ve only ever had a secure border when Donald Trump was president, and we need him to do it again.”
“That’s why he needs his whole team around him, and that starts with Kristi Noem,” she added.
Noem’s nomination hearing with the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is set for Wednesday, January 15.
Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily on Thursday that the Senate will look to hold a vote on confirming Noem “in the first week after the inauguration.”
“There can’t be a vote until the president is sworn in and then the president makes their nomination official. So that’s the earliest possible time,” he noted.
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