"ANOTHER one of Crooked Joe Biden's Illegal Immigrant Criminals was just charged with raping and murdering ANOTHER innocent American woman," Trump wrote. "Rachel Morin was on a run in Maryland, just like Laken Riley was in Georgia, when she was brutally killed by an illegal monster."
Martinez-Hernandez has not yet been convicted in Morin's death. He is believed to have crossed the U.S. border in February 2023 after his name appeared on an arrest warrant in El Salvador on charges he had killed a young woman, CBS News reports.
Law enforcement officials also tie Martinez-Hernandez to a home-invasion assault in Los Angeles last year that left a 9-year-old girl and her mother injured, the Washington Post reports.
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Trump is not the first to connect Morin's death with a recent surge in the number of people who seek to cross the U.S. southern border that saw an unprecedented 302,000 encounters (including apprehensions and expulsions) in December.
Randolph Rice, an attorney representing Morin's family, told the Washington Post he also blames lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
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“Americans keep dying because the politicians in Washington can’t solve the problem,” Rice told the Post. “Rachel would be alive today if politicians would stop this flow of illegal immigrants.”
While Republicans argue Democrats are to blame for lax immigration policies — despite their having killed a bipartisan border bill in February and a recent executive order from Biden that activists call "draconian" in its strictness — historians and political scientists say the problem dates back decades.
President Ronald Reagan, for example, has been subjected to blame for unrest in El Salvador for sending billions of dollars to a regime that killed thousands of people with massacres, paramilitary outfits and death squads.
The complexity of the situation, and the sadness, did not stop Trump — found liable last year of sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll — from casting himself as the protecter of women against the one person he blames: Biden.
"On day one, we will SHUT DOWN THE BORDER and start deporting millions of Biden's Illegal Criminals," Trump declared. "We will once again put AMERICANS First and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!"
Women's safety will likely be a key issue in the 2024 presidential election, political experts predict, as the nation grapples with the conservative-majority Supreme Court's historic ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that has been called a "human rights crisis."
"Restrictions on access to healthcare places women’s lives and health at risk, leading to increased maternal mortality and morbidity, a climate of fear among healthcare providers, and reduced access to all forms of care," writes Human Rights Watch.
"Dobbs also enables penalization and criminalization of healthcare, with providers, patients, and third parties at risk of prosecution or civil suit for their involvement in private healthcare decisions."
