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Maria Espinoza, national director of the Remembrance Project, a non-profit representing the victims of illegal immigrant crime and their families, testified that:
Americans will continue to be under assault until the wall is built … While it seemed as though the politicians listened and even publicly gave the families their condolences, congressional leadership, the bodies of both houses, Republican and Democrat, have failed to enact the very measures that would have saved American lives. America has spoken. We want the wall built right away … those who falsely state that a great border wall would not work either don’t know their history or are in denial.”
Agnes Gibbony, one of Espinoza’s “angel mothers” whose son was murdered by an illegal alien, took over to add her own horrific experience with lax border enforcement to the congressional record. Gibbony’s herself is an immigrant, fleeing to America with her parents in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s bloody Soviet intervention in her native Hungary in 1956. Her memory of immigration is a far cry from the lawless chaos on the southern border today. “We followed all the rules, the law. We followed all the background investigation … We also had to have character witnesses testify that we had good moral standing and my father was required to have a job contract,” she recalled for the Subcommittee.