Angel Moms testify about daughters’ deaths, blast Biden policies

Two “Angel Moms” who lost their daughters to the crime and drugs pouring through the U.S. southern border offered emotional congressional testimony Thursday, laying partial blame for their grief on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the Biden administration’s policies.

Tammy Nobles, whose 20-year-old daughter, Kayla, was murdered in 2022 by a suspected MS-13 gang member released by Border Patrol, and Josephine Dunn, whose daughter, Ashley, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021 at 26, told their stories during a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee.

Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., noted in a Wednesday letter to Mayorkas that the secretary declined an in-person invitation to attend the hearing titled “Voices for the Victims: The Heartbreaking Reality of the Mayorkas Border Crisis.”

When Mayorkas requested a different date for the hearing, Republicans on the committee asked him instead to submit written testimony by Jan. 28, according to The New York Times.

The hearing featured as the final in a series of impeachment hearings against Mayorkas. House Republicans could bring charges against him as early as this week for failing to enforce the country’s immigration laws.

In her opening statement about how the open border has devastated her family, Nobles recalled how her daughter Kayla “was kind, caring, thoughtful and funny.”

“She loved life and God, and she showed the world that being yourself was OK; you didn’t have to follow everyone else,” Nobles said.

The mother received “the worst news that a parent doesn’t want to hear” on July 27, 2022, when she learned that Kayla had been “murdered in her own room and left on the floor like trash.”

Kayla was murdered by a suspected MS-13 gang member who Border Patrol released despite tattoos on his body showing his gang affiliation, Nobles said.

“Had DHS employees performed a visual inspection of his body, they would have seen MS-13 gang-related tattoos disqualifying him from entering the U.S.,” she explained.

“DHS employees failed to make a simple phone call to the El Salvadorian government to verify if the assailant was on an MS-13 gang affiliation list. Had they done so, El Salvador government officials would have confirmed that the assailant was a known MS-13 gang member with a prior criminal history.”

The grieving mother also argues the Department of Health and Human Services also dropped the ball and “sealed her daughter’s fate” by “violating protocol” and releasing the assailant, identified at the time as a minor, into the U.S. without placing him with a family member or a sponsor. 

Nobles concluded by urging those in the room to “take a moment and think about how Kayla felt that day; how scared she must have been that day knowing that she was dying; if she was going to see her mommy again, her baby sister, her brother, or her cat Oreo.”

“Kayla fought for her life that day with all that she had, and in the end, she lost to an individual that wasn’t even supposed to be allowed in the country,” Nobles added. “For me, this is not a political issue. This is a safety issue for everyone living in the United States.”

Dunn, who testified next, was driven to tears multiple times throughout her opening statement, during which she remembered her late daughter Ashley and described fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction [that] has killed over 100,000 Americans on our soil for two years in a row.”

Her home state of Arizona has become “the fentanyl superhighway into the United States,” Dunn said. Her daughter died after accidentally ingesting fentanyl, believing it was oxycodone.

In March of 2021, 26-year-old Ashley Dunn died from fentanyl poisoning.

Her son, Carson, turned five the day after his mother’s passing.

Ashely’s mom, Josephine, testified before Congress: “Arizona is the Fentanyl superhighway into the United States.”

She holds @AliMayorkas &… pic.twitter.com/TulkETLSHx

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) January 18, 2024

Dunn said that as she and her husband sat for 86 hours in the ICU, they “were begging God, we were pleading [with] God, bargaining that she would just breathe.” Since Ashley’s death 32 months ago, Dunn said her daughter has been gone for three of her son’s birthdays and missed out on seeing one graduate kindergarten.

“She celebrated the last of her birthdays when she was 26,” she added. “She will forever be 26.”

Dunn criticized Mayorkas for not appearing during the hearing, and both women later said they partially blamed Mayorkas and his policies for the death of their daughters.

Dunn told Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, that the hearing had fallen on what would have been her daughter’s 29th birthday.

“I would have much rather been home with my poor husband grieving her,” she said. “I didn’t need to be here today. So whatever [Mayorkas] is doing, I hope it’s more important than that.”

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