When policy becomes personal: The real cost failing to enforce immigration laws

While lawmakers stood before the cameras on Capitol Hill to tell their story, a heartbroken mother stood in front of a group of cameras about a hundred miles south of D.C. in Richmond, to tell a very different one.

Lawmakers of both parties had failed Cheryl Minter. She is the heartbroken mom who bravely stood up and faced a parent’s worst nightmare when she lost her child.

Minter woke up on February 23, 2026, never in her worst nightmare imagining that she would soon be told her daughter had been stabbed to death by a man who had no right to be in the U.S. in the first place, and certainly no business freely wandering its streets.

Why was this man free to stab Stephanie Minter to death? Minter is just one of many who have lost their lives for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the presence of a violent illegal alien. In Washington and in state capitols and city halls across the country, we hear passionate debates over immigration policy.

Republicans argue for walls, stronger borders and funding for immigration enforcement. But Democrats, in a departure from their previous practice, argue that the immigration enforcement agencies — ICE and the Border Patrol — are out of control and must be abolished or reformed to curtail their enforcement powers.

Talk show hosts spar over ICE and immigration policy. For many,........

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