Just hours after a federal judge threatened a contempt-of-court investigation over the Trump administration’s deportation flights, the White House sought to freeze the legal debate by reminding Americans of a heartbreaking case of a mother killed by an immigrant in the country without legal permission.

White House officials called a special briefing Wednesday in the press room to bring Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, who was killed while jogging on a trail in Maryland in 2023, to the podium. She recounted in detail how her daughter, a 37-year-old mother of five, was seized, raped and bashed in the head with rocks and ultimately strangled. Members of her family also appeared at the Republican National Convention last July.

An immigrant from El Salvador, Victor Martinez-Hernandez, was convicted in the case this week.

The story was a tragic one, and it has fueled President Donald Trump’s arguments about dangers posed by migrants and a debate about capital punishment. Nonetheless, the invitation of Patty Morin seemed a somewhat transparent effort to suspend the arguments about whether the administration could lawfully send migrants to El Salvador with no due process, and whether it can defy the orders of district judges who order the flights halted.

Statistics show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes on American soil than U.S. citizens, and Trump’s claims of a wave of violent crime committed by immigrants have not been supported by police or court data. But it is a popular talking point among Trump’s base of supporters, and he often brought out family members of victims during his presidential campaign.

By conflating different incidents, the Trump administration appeared to be diverting the conversation from whether his administration could defy the courts, or deny due process to those arrested and shipped out of the country to a prison the United States is paying for.

Before Morin spoke, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, criticized Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., for traveling to El Salvador to press for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was seized and sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador in what the government admitted was an “administrative error.”

Leavitt accused him again of being a member of the MS-13 gang, a terrorist, and, in a new claim, a perpetrator of spousal abuse. She called him a “woman beater” and waved a court filing, one that sought an order of protection against him.

After the briefing, Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, acknowledged that she had filed the papers. But she said she had not pressed the case.

“Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process,” she said. “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By David E. Sanger/Doug Mills
c. 2025 The New York Times Company