Her Son Killed by a ‘DREAMer’

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Fresh from offering emotionally wrenching testimony on Capitol Hill, the mother of a teenager slain by a classmate who was in the United States illegally told Laura Ingraham on Wednesday about the heartache her family still faces five years later.

Houston-area resident Joshua Wilkerson gave Hermilo Moralez a ride home in November 2010. Morales had entered this country illegally from Belize along with family when he was 10 years old.

Laura Wilkerson repeated the gruesome details that came out of Moralez’s murder trial in 2013: The defendant — who testified that Joshua Wilkerson had kicked his dog — punched the victim so hard that he was blinded. Then, the defendant kneed his victim with such force that it drove his spleen into his spine. Then he grabbed a curtain rod and beat the victim over the head until the rod broke in four places.

Moralez tied Wilkerson up, drove him in the victim’s truck to a field — after stopping to buy a can of gas — and set the body on fire.

“He was just like everybody’s kid. He was just an average kid. … He just was like your kid or anybody else’s kid in America,” Laura Wilkerson told Ingraham.

“He was just like everybody’s kid. He was just an average kid. … He just was like your kid or anybody else’s kid in America,” Laura Wilkerson told Ingraham.

Wilkerson testified Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee along with the father of Kate Steinle, a woman who, according to reports, died July 1 at the hands of a man who had been deported five times.

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According to attendees at the hearing, two Democratic senators on the panel, Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dick Durbin of Illinois, walked out of the hearing on Capitol Hill before the riveting, and deeply personal, testimony offered by Wilkerson and Jim Steinle.

Wilkerson told Ingraham she believes Moralez either planned to steal the truck to flee from a pending harassment charge or to sell the vehicle to pay for his defense. She has since joined a support group for victims of illegal immigrant crime called the Remembrance Project. On “The Laura Ingraham Show,” she praised GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stand on immigration.

“He didn’t say it, maybe the right way. But he spoke. What was in his words was a lot of truth,” she said. “And he got out in two minutes what we’ve been trying to say at the Remembrance Project for, you know, five years.”

Wilkerson blasted so-called “sanctuary cities,” which have refused to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s fiscal year 2014 annual report, since January 2014 — when the agency first began tracking it — state and local law enforcement authorities have declined to hold 10,182 illegal immigrants who federal law stipulates should be detained.

“This required ICE to expend additional resources attempting to locate, apprehend, and remove criminal aliens who were released into the community, rather than transferred directly into custody,” the report stated. “These changes further contributed to decreased ICE removals.”

Said Wilkerson: “You cannot tie the policemen’s hands from doing the job that they swore to uphold.”

Said Wilkerson: “You cannot tie the policemen’s hands from doing the job that they swore to uphold.”

Some congressional Republicans have vowed to stop some federal grants to sanctuary cities. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee voted 28-21 in favor of an amendment by Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., to cut off grants from the Department of Homeland Security to cities that fail to cooperate with or carry out the directives of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Some skeptics have questioned the commitment of the Republican leadership in the House and Senate to follow through, however. Yoder told Ingraham Tuesday he believes House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., support him.

“I assume they’re supportive of defunding sanctuary cities,” he said.

Pressed by Ingraham, though, Yoder added, “I guess, maybe, I should say I hope they do.”

Representatives of Boehner’s office could not immediately be reached for comment. A spokesman for McConnell, Donald Stewart, noted that Democrats in the upper chamber are using parliamentary maneuvers to block all spending bills from coming to the floor. So it is unlikely that a companion amendment offered by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., will pass in that manner.

Stewart said McConnell supports the idea, however.

“It’s something he would like to see addressed,” he said. “I don’t know what the avenue will be for that.”

Conservatives are sure to follow the leadership’s commitment to the crackdown effort closely following the showdown earlier this year on President Obama’s executive amnesty, which resulted in a capitulation by congressional Republican leaders.

Wilkerson expressed disappointment in former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s position that illegal immigrants should be entitled to in-state tuition at state universities, and in fellow GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s pronouncements that illegal immigrants are coming to America to make a better life.

“I understand that,” Wilkerson said. “But I’ll tell you what, I didn’t put my kid in harm’s way for a better life. I sent him to school one day. And Rick Perry needs to understand I have compassion for everyone.”

She added, “If we put as much emphasis on American families and American children, we might get ahead in this country. … We take God out of everything and we put politics in everything.”

She added, “If we put as much emphasis on American families and American children, we might get ahead in this country. … We take God out of everything and we put politics in everything.”

Wilkerson said she hopes her pain will be a little bit less in five years than it is now.

“You breathe every second. … There’re so many losses after the initial loss of your son. I can’t even begin to describe them,” she said. “You just feel disoriented from this life. You just try each day to heal.”