The mother of a police officer killed in the line of duty by an illegal immigrant wants answers from the White House.
Mary Anne Mendoza’s son Brandon was killed by Raul Silva-Corona, who had been in the country illegally for decades despite having a lengthy criminal record. Silva-Corona killed the then 32-year-old officer in May of 2014, when he struck Brandon’s squad car head-on while driving in the wrong direction on a Phoenix freeway. The illegal immigrant had a blood-alcohol content of 0.24 percent (three times the legal level).
The grief-stricken mother has made it her mission to seek a change in the law.
“Mendoza said she takes no issue with law-abiding undocumented immigrants in the country,” USA Today reports.
“But when you go into another country…and commit a crime, that’s where I draw the line,” she said.
Mendoza appeared as a guest on Fox and Friends on Sunday, which was “National Remembrance Day,” created by victims’ families to commemorate the lives of their loved ones killed by illegal aliens.
The mother told host Tucker Carlson: “I had no idea what a huge problem this was, until it happened to me. I don’t want any other American family to go through what I’ve gone through the last year and a half of my life.”
“What is so distressing is how political this is,” Carlson observed. “If you flip it around, and your son had taken the life of an illegal alien, in a so-called biased crime, that family would be at the White House meeting with the president. Has the president met with you?”
Mendoza replied:
No. I’ve written three letters to the president. It’s very disheartening to see the people that he does have in the White House. When I was in Washington in July testifying at the Kate Steinle hearing, the Obamas had illegal students there to talk about the challenges they’ve overcome to get to college, and the very next day had illegal teachers at the White House and we were blocks away from the White House, and we have been pleading with them to meet with us. To see our faces to feel our pain, to hear our stories and to maybe understand this problem a little better and do something about it for Americans.
In one letter Mendoza wrote to President Obama, she pointed out that the man who killed her son had purchased a vehicle and registered to drive it in Maricopa County, Arizona, despite being in the country illegally, with multiple previous criminal convictions, no Social Security number and no valid driver’s license. She communicated that this is “NOT ACCEPTABLE TO ME!! AND it shouldn’t be acceptable to any US Citizen. Mr. President, you don’t have the right to make this decision yourself…”
As reported by Western Journalism, the Obama administration has released 166,000 illegal aliens with criminal convictions back into the population. Congressman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, issued a statement in the spring describing the action as “the worst prison break in American history.” He added that: “President Obama’s lax immigration policies have put the lives of Americans at risk.”
During her Fox and Friends interview, Mendoza expressed her frustration with Washington more broadly, stating: “The Democrats want [illegal immigrants] here for voter base, and the Republicans want them here for cheap labor, so we are basically hitting our heads against the wall.”
She did, however, praise presidential candidate Donald Trump for making illegal immigration a front and center issue. “Donald Trump opened the door for us and for our stories to be heard. Families have been fighting for this for many years prior to this happening to my son,” she said.
h/t: YoungCons