There are some things that just leave you speechless, and what happened in the White House Press Room today is one of them. And it didn’t just leave me speechless — it left the reporter pool stunned, too.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that she’d be holding an impromptu press briefing with a special guest on Wednesday afternoon, and if you missed it, it was a doozy.
The topic was Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Well, sort of. Leavitt started by pointing out that Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was currently in El Salvador, pleading with the country’s government to release one of its own citizens — a member of the foreign terrorist organization MS-13 with a history of violence who was in the United States illegally — so he can smuggle him back into the United States so we can probably deport him again.
Leavitt began, “Today, we have officially learned Democrat officials still refuse to accept the will of the American people” before, once again, reminding us who the left has spent the last couple of weeks defending so vehemently.
Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen rushed to Dulles Airport this morning to fly to El Salvador, potentially using taxpayer dollars, to demand the release of a deported illegal alien MS-13 terrorist. The Democrats and the media in this room have continually and wrongly labeled Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a ‘Maryland Father.’
There is no ‘Maryland Father.’ Let me reiterate: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, and foreign terrorist who was deported back to his home country. And when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was originally arrested, he was wearing a sweatshirt with rolls of money covering the ears, mouth, and eyes of presidents on various currency denominations. This is a known MS-13 gang symbol of “Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.” Abrego Garcia was also arrested with two other well-known members of the vicious MS-13 gang, and two separate judges found that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, and that finding has never been disputed.
And just this morning, it was revealed through Maryland court documents that Abrego Garcia’s wife petitioned for an order of protection against him for two instances of domestic violence in May of 2021. And here is the order right here. The court ordered that “The respondent committed the following acts of abuse.” Once in May of 2021, “Assault in any degree,” and on May 4th of 2021, he punched and scratched his wife, ripped off her shirt, and grabbed and bruised her.
She added:
And if he ever ends up back in the United States, he would immediately be deported again. Nothing will change the fact that Abrego Garcia will never be a ‘Maryland Father.’
He will never live in the United States of America again.
And the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the President of the United States and the Secretary of State could not be compelled to forcibly retrieve this citizen of El Salvador, who is currently locked up in a maximum security prison in his home country due to his MS-13 membership.
Next, Leavitt brought out her special guest, Patty Morin. If you’re not sure who she is, she’s the mother of Rachel Morin. Rachel was a 37-year-old mother of five in 2023 who was out walking on a trail she frequented in Maryland when she was brutally raped and murdered by Victor Martinez Hernandez, a Salvadoran man who was in the United States illegally. After a 10-month manhunt, he was captured last year and recently sentenced to life in prison.
Rachel and Patty’s story is truly heartbreaking, and I’m going to let it speak for itself here. Warning: It’s very graphic.
We’ve walked the trail for the last 25 years that we’ve lived in Maryland. It’s a safe place for our family. It’s where we go to get a little bit of New England, because that’s where we’re from, New England. When she went on that trail that day, she was not planning on dying. She wasn’t planning on walking to her death. She was planning on going to the grocery store with her girls afterwards. Victor Martinez, he waited for her. He waited for her to come closer. He saw her. He saw that there was nobody around. He attacked her.
He dragged her 150 feet, blood gushing from her head. It left 150-foot trail of her blood to the culverts where he took… He picked her up. He threw her against the wall of the tunnel, and he raped her. But before he did that, he stopped on that trail and rocks still stained with her blood, he used them to hammer her head against those rocks. They say 20, at least 20 times they could count the cuts in her head.
They said that when they did the autopsy, and I’ve seen the pictures, there’s a 6-inch square in the back of her head where the skull is shattered the way that you would crush an eggshell, in pieces. Three-fourths of her brain hemorrhaged. Her right and left side of her face bashed in.
Her beautiful face bashed in. Her head bashed in. Broken bones, fractures. He takes and he drags her some more. He drags her through the thorn bushes. She has all these scrapes and cuts on her body. There wasn’t one inch of her body that didn’t have some kind of injury, whether it’s bruising, um, broken bones, contusions, the scratches.
She had a, um, fractured rib, a fractured nose, fractured skull. And then he takes her into the tunnel, and he picks her up. He throws her against the wall. Blood is gushing from her head. Her hair is soaked in blood. And they showed us pictures of her body against the wall, outlined, the blood outlined her body, and you could see where the blood ran down around her as he was raping her.
And then he threw her down and raped her some more. And then he strangled her because he didn’t want her to be able to live to tell the story. They said that when they did the autopsy on her neck, that one of the things they do is they open up the neck and they look to see how far the injury is. And it went all the way down as far as an injury is possible, hemorrhaging in the muscles because of how, um, strong and violent the grip was around her.
Patty said that when she was sitting in the courtroom with this man — no, animal — she could tell he had no remorse: “These are the kind of people that have no, no compulsion. Like, to them, this is nothing. And when he was sitting in the courtroom, he actually looked like he thought he was going to be set free. There was no remorse on his face at all.”
“This person took my daughter so violently and so gruesomely and so graphically that they sealed the pictures because I don’t want my granddaughters to see these pictures. The — these are the kind of criminals President Trump wants to remove from our country,” she continued. “These are the kind of criminals that we need to remove from our country. We are American citizens. Why should we allow people like this, violent criminals that have no conscience at all, to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters?”
Patty also pointed out something the president said earlier in the week: This isn’t a political issue; it’s common sense.
“I don’t understand why there’s even any kind of problem with this. And it’s not that it’s political, like the left or the right, although I understand different parties have used it in the past. But we have to look at it as we are American citizens. We need to protect our families, our borders, our children.”
Related: You Can’t Make This Up: El Salvador Rejects Maryland Senator’s Visit
Patty finished her speech with this:
I want to preserve life, and that’s the only reason why I have taken and spoken about Rachel all this time. If you’re a mother here in the room, can you imagine standing there alive, you’re alive, and someone comes and puts their hands into your chest and rips out your heart?
That’s what it feels like. It feels like a part of you is being ripped out of you. You can’t even describe the pain, just like you can’t describe to your husband what it feels like to carry a baby in your womb, or to feel those first kicks, or to know just intuitively if it’s a boy or a girl. It’s only a thing that a mother knows.
Why are we not protecting the American citizens? It’s just common sense. Why are we not protecting our children? And to have a senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge or barely acknowledged my daughter and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother and now a grandbaby without a grandmother, so that he can use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that’s not even an American citizen.
Her final statement? “Why does that person have more right than I do, or my daughter, or my grandchildren?”
Leavitt asked if anyone had any questions, but the press room was so stunned that barely anyone spoke. As the two women were walking about of the room, Patty turned to the media and said the words, “Tell the truth.”
You can watch the entire briefing here:
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