U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents working at the Peace Bridge Border Crossing in Buffalo, New York, apprehended a French-Canadian woman who tried to poison former president Donald Trump and several Texas officials. She was just sentenced to 21 years in prison.
Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier, 55, a dual citizen of Canada and France, was sentenced to 262 months in prison, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. She was also sentenced to a lifetime of supervised release, for sending threatening letters containing homemade ricin (a lethal toxin), in September 2020, to then-President Donald Trump at the White House. She also sent ricin to eight Texas State law enforcement officials, the DOJ says.
The sentencing took eight months after Ferrier first pleaded guilty on Jan. 25 in two separate criminal cases related to biological weapons. One case was being heard in the District of Columbia. The other case was in the Southern District of Texas, which was transferred to the District of Columbia to consolidate pleas and sentencing.
According to court documents, Ferrier admitted that she made ricin at her residence in Quebec, Canada, in September 2020, the DOJ reported. Ricin, a deadly poison, is made from castor beans. She then placed the ricin toxin in envelopes in which she mailed letters that she wrote to then-President Trump and eight Texas State law enforcement officials.
The letters contained “threatening language,” the DOJ says. The one addressed to then-President Trump told him to “[g]ive up and remove [his] application for this election.” Ferrier mailed the ricin-laced letters from Canada.
Before doing so, she’d already been detained in Texas for roughly 10 weeks in the spring of 2019. She sent ricin-laced letters to the Texas law enforcement officials who’d detained her.
By early September 2020, Ferrier had asked anyone on Twitter to “please shoot [T]rump in the face.”
The letters she wrote referred to a “special gift,” the ricin, and said, “If it doesn’t work, I will find a better recipe for another poison,” according to court documents. In other letters she wrote, she “might use my gun when I will be able to come.”
On Sept. 20, 2020, she’d drove from Canada to the Peace Bridge Border Crossing in Buffalo, New York, seeking to enter the U.S. Border Patrol officials stopped and arrested her after discovering that she was in possession of a loaded firearm, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and other weapons.
She expressed no remorse at her sentencing hearing. She said, “I consider myself to be an activist, not a terrorist. Activists are constructive, terrorists are destructive.”
“The only regret I have is that it didn’t work and that I couldn’t stop Trump,” CNN reported.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the DOJ’s National Security Division, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves for the District of Columbia and Assistant Director Susan Ferensic of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate made the announcement.
The FBI District of Columbia and San Antonio, Texas, field offices investigated the case. U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service investigators also participated in the investigation.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Friedman for the District of Columbia; Assistant U.S. Attorneys Rob Jones, David Coronado and David Lindenmuth for the Southern District of Texas; and Trial Attorney David Smith of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section prosecuted the case.
She was apprehended in the busiest northern border sector combating illegal entry. Swanton Sector Border Patrol agents have, in the last 10 months alone, apprehended more than 5,400 illegal foreign nationals attempting to illegally enter the U.S. from Canada. That’s more than they’ve apprehended in the previous nine years combined. The sector includes all of Vermont, six upstate New York counties and three New Hampshire counties.
