The Patriot Post® · Trump Hosts Angel Families

“Thank God we have you in office,” said Marie Vega to President Donald Trump. “Without you, America and the world would not know the consequences of open borders.”

Marie Vega knows. She knows about those awful consequences, and she knows them intimately. Her son, Harvey, a former U.S. Marine and Border Patrol agent, was ambushed and murdered by two illegal aliens during a family fishing trip.

“Thank you for restoring law and order,” she continued. “Thank you for acknowledging us — the Angel Families.”

If you read these pages regularly, you know what the term “Angel Families” refers to. You know it refers to families whose loved ones have been taken from them by illegal aliens — families like those of Mollie Tibbetts, Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray. You know that these families are the very real victims of Joe Biden’s wide-open southern border and his administration’s unwillingness to secure it.

Heck, it was two years ago, during his State of the Union Address, that Joe Biden disgracefully feigned concern, holding up a “Laken Riley” button that had been given to him by his handlers and calling her “Lincoln Riley.”

But if you count on the Appropriated Press or its many media minions to decide what’s newsworthy, especially as it concerns the bloody and terrible toll that illegal immigration exacts, then you might be in the dark. (Go ahead: Search the AP news site for even minimal coverage of yesterday’s Angel Families event, and you’ll come up empty.)

Trump did more than pay solemn tribute to these families yesterday at the White House. He listened once again to their stories, and he designated February 22 as National Angel Family Day — “a day of remembrance for victims and their grieving loved ones devastated by the consequences of open border policies.”

There yesterday, in addition to Marie Vega, were Allyson Phillips, the mother of Laken Riley, the aspiring nurse who was murdered by José Ibarra; Steve Ronnebeck, whose 21-year-old son, Grant, was murdered by an illegal alien while working at a convenience store; Laura Wilkerson, whose son, Joshua, was brutally murdered by his illegal alien classmate; and many more.

There, too, wrenchingly, was Officer Ethan Curreri, the man who’d arrested the aforementioned José Ibarra. “A few months later,” said Curreri, “I saw his face again in the news after he viciously murdered Laken Riley. I did my job. I put him in custody. The system failed.”

That system — if it can rightly be called a system — had been perpetuated by Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats. But no more. Donald Trump is committed to fixing it.

As Trump’s Angel Families Day proclamation reads, “I call on the American people to assemble in their respective places of worship to pay homage to the victims killed by illegal aliens and to those taken by the fentanyl epidemic, and lift up the Angel Families and families devastated by drug overdoses. I further call upon public officials, community leaders, and all citizens to end the violence and lawlessness that have claimed so many innocent lives.”

So when you see our federal law enforcement agents being taunted and obstructed and threatened and vilified and doxed and assaulted in places like Minneapolis, remember what this fight is all about. Remember that this is part of a titanic struggle between the Rule of Law and the rule of men.

By the way, if you think this is an issue that Trump only embraced when he became president, think again. Back in 2015 and 2016, Candidate Trump was talking about illegal alien crime while the frontrunner, Jeb Bush — remember him? — was pandering in Spanish, claiming Trump wanted to “insult his way to the presidency” and talking about “a path to legal status,” which the rest of us rightly understood to mean amnesty. But don’t believe me. Here’s Laura Wilkerson:

I met a man about 11 years ago, who was running for office, and he sat with us a couple days, and he watched as the tears rolled down my face as I told him the story of how our youngest son, Joshua, was brutally beaten, tortured, strangled to death, and his body set on fire. The man next to me was President Trump. He never, ever, looked away from my pain. He looked me straight in the eye, and he said, ‘I will never forget the story of your sweet son, and I will never give up fighting for the American family.’ … He has never missed a day of fighting for the American family.“

Trump will no doubt cover this grim terrain once again in tonight’s State of the Union Address, as well he should. And each of us should remember all this unnecessary pain and suffering come the November midterms. Each of us should remember: There but for the grace of God goes my own family.

Accordingly, let each of us never forget.