OPINION:
The terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas have focused much of America’s public conversation on matters of national security and the urgent need for the incoming Trump administration to hit the ground at full speed on Inauguration Day.
As mothers who have suffered losses, we have tremendous personal empathy for the innocent victims and families whose lives will be forever altered because our worlds were also shattered by the government’s failure to protect its citizens.
Our children were lost to another enormous national security problem – the poorly enforced southern border with Mexico – and we stand with the victims of New Orleans. We also strongly urge the U.S. Senate to confirm all of President-elect Donald Trump’s national security appointees, especially South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, as quickly as possible. Because we know that as a mother herself, Ms. Noem will defend our nation as fiercely as she would defend her own children.
We also call for the rapid confirmation of Pete Hegseth as the secretary of defense, Pam Bondi as attorney general, and Kash Patel as FBI director. These are all essential Trump team members, and the president will need them as soon as he can get them in place.
We have tragic personal experiences with prior government failures, which is why we are eager for change. Our children were murdered, either by illegal aliens themselves or by the cartels who peddle the illicit drugs that come across the border. Sadly, we represent just a tiny fraction of the families who have been forever devastated by the intentional weakening of our border security by the outgoing administration and others in the past.
Over the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration made clear that America would welcome illegal immigrants and figuratively laid out the welcome mat and turned on the “vacancy” sign. They overturned all prior Trump policies that secured the border and implemented plans that favor the border crossers over the safety of American citizens. We traded the most secure border in our nation’s history for the weakest.
As a result, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol report almost 11 million encounters with illegal border crossers over the last four years, not counting millions of “gotaways” that they know about. And there were millions more who took advantage of free relocation airplane flights from the government or used a federal smartphone app that lets illegal aliens schedule asylum hearings they never plan to attend.
These are statistics, and they’re easy enough for anyone to recite. But we have arguments that others cannot deliver because we know what others don’t. We know the human toll of the crisis because we have lived it, and we know the identities of some of the casualties of this colossal irresponsibility because they were our children.
Weston Fundner, for example, was an amazing kid – everyone who knew him agreed – and he excelled in school in California, both academically and athletically. He was just 15 years old in 2022 when he succumbed to peer pressure and took one pill, not knowing it was laced with deadly fentanyl. Weston was found lifeless in his own bedroom the following morning by his father, the victim of the open border policies that allowed the poison to flow into our communities.
Kayla Hamilton had just celebrated her 20th birthday three days before she was raped and killed by an illegal alien in Maryland in July 2022. Walter Javier Martinez was a known MS-13 member with a criminal gang record in his home country of El Salvador who should have been easily identified as a threat when he was encountered at the border. He was able to enter the United States anyway and eventually find and kill Hamilton, who died after being tied up and strangled with a phone cord.
To be sure, illegal aliens did not begin wreaking havoc on Americans in just the recent past. However, the tragedies that some of us have endured have caused us to conclude that only Mr. Trump and his team can fix the problem. Because the names of our loved ones are still with us, and we don’t want any more families to suffer the way we have.
To that point, we remember Ronald da Silva, who was 29 the day he was standing in a friend’s driveway in California in 2002 when an illegal alien shot and killed him with a bullet intended for another person. The killer, a known gang member from Mexico named Luis Humberto Gonzalez, had already been deported at least once and illegally returned to the United States. Da Silva’s mother, a legally naturalized American citizen originally from Hungary, was not permitted to hold her son at the hospital and could only bang on a window to try to get him to open his eyes to look at her.
Individually, these stories didn’t generate as many headlines as the terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas, but in our lives, these were the greatest heartaches we have ever known. Only Mr. Trump and his administration will take steps to stop this from happening to other families. To that end, we urge the rapid confirmation of Ms. Noem and the rest of Mr. Trump’s national security team.
• Anne Fundner is the mother of Weston Fundner, who died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022. Tammy Nobles is the mother of Kayla Hamilton, who was killed by an illegal alien, also in 2022. Agnes Gibboney is the mother of Ronald da Silva, who was killed by an illegal alien in 2002. Mothers who have lost children in tragedies related to the border crisis have become collectively known as Angel Moms.
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