Last Thursday night on Long Island, 22-year-old Rony Yahir Alvarenga Rivera allegedly hacked his 32-year-old roommate to death with a knife in their shared apartment. Three hours later he walked into the local Wendy’s where he worked, ambushed his 42-year-old coworker as she took out the trash and stabbed her repeatedly in the neck and torso.
Both women – Eddy Raquel Hernandez Castillo and Ana Maria de Aguila Cordova, a mother of three – died from their wounds. Rivera then called police himself to report that he had “killed somebody.”
The accused is not some hardened gang enforcer with a rap sheet. According to Nassau County authorities, he entered the United States illegally in 2016 as a 12-year-old unaccompanied minor from El Salvador. He was granted the protections our immigration system extends to children who cross the border alone. No prior arrests. No known gang ties. Yet two American women are dead because a boy the system embraced grew into a man who allegedly slaughtered them.
This is not an isolated tragedy. It is the predictable result of a more than decade-long narrative pushed relentlessly by major media outlets, activist organizations, and anti-border politicians: that any minor who sets foot on U.S. soil deserves to remain here, shielded from deportation, housed, fed, and eventually legalized.
Photographs of wide-eyed toddlers in foil blankets, the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crying crocodile tears in a designer suit outside a migrant detention center parking lot, and cable-news segments featuring sympathetic social workers have framed illegal border-crossing minors as innocent victims rather than future adults who will be held to the same standards as everyone else. The message is clear: compassion demands we keep them.
But compassion without realism can be deadly to Americans. Rivera arrived at 12. He was housed, schooled, and presumably integrated into American life under policies that treat unaccompanied minors as presumptive refugees. Ten years later he stands accused of savagery that would shock any civilized society. And he is not alone. Time and again, individuals who crossed as minors have aged into violent offenders – MS-13 recruits, carjackers, sexual predators – whose crimes fill local police blotters from New York to California. The same activists who once wept for the “kids in cages” fall strangely silent when those kids become violent predators.
The tactic is effective because Americans are generous. We recoil at the idea of separating children from parents, and rightly so. Yet the left’s own “no human is illegal” rhetoric has produced the very separations it claims to abhor. When minors cross alone or with coyotes, they are often placed in shelters or foster programs while parents remain south of the border or are deported separately.
The humane solution is obvious: families that cross together should be deported together. If a family unit presents a credible asylum claim, process it – but relocate them to the nearest safe third country, not the United States. Most asylum claims, as countless audits and court records show, are economic rather than political; they are fraudulent attempts to game our generosity.
Meanwhile, America already struggles to raise its own children. Pediatric obesity rates hover near 20%. Attention-deficit diagnoses have exploded. Learning losses from COVID-related school closures still plague an entire generation. Social-media addiction fuels anxiety, depression, and violence among American teens. Our foster-care system is overwhelmed, our inner-city schools are failing, and our mental-health infrastructure is threadbare. Every tax dollar spent housing, educating, and medically treating illegal alien minors is a dollar not spent on American kids who never asked to compete for resources with foreign nationals who entered unlawfully.
The American public is not heartless for noticing this pattern. Polls consistently show majorities of Americans across parties favor enforcement first, then legal immigration that serves our national interest. When media and politicians pathologize that instinct as “xenophobia,” they are not defending children. They are defending a failed ideology that treats American citizenship as a global entitlement, as well as a cynical plan to dilute the votes of Americans with those of foreign nationals to create a California-like one-party rule throughout the country.
There are remedies, but they require the fortitude to ignore the anti-borders activists’ cynical, emotion-based manipulations: Deport illegal alien families intact. End catch-and-release for minors. Process legitimate asylum claims offshore in safe third countries. And redirect every resource we currently lavish on illegal aliens toward the American children whose obesity, learning gaps, and mental-health crises we have shamefully neglected. The alternative is more nights when the phone rings and another family learns that sympathy for foreign nationals came at the price of their loved ones’ lives. America’s generosity is not infinite, and our first duty is to our own.
