White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders started Thursday's press briefing by focusing on immigration bills making their way through Congress and listed multiple Americans who were killed by illegal immigrants.
"A star high school athlete from Los Angeles who was killed by a member of the 18th Street gang while his mother was serving her second tour of duty in Iraq," Sanders said.
"Joshua Wilkerson, who was brutally beaten and tortured to death by his classmate in Texas who then set his body on fire," she added.
"Christy Pena, a 14-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by a man who had multiple warrants out for other crimes involving kidnapping and rape," Sanders said. "Twenty-five years later, he was finally located in his native Mexico, where he fled after murdering Christy in 1990."
The bills that led Sanders to discuss these cases are "Kate's Law" and the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act. If signed into law, these bills would, respectively, strengthen penalties for deported immigrants who try to re-enter the country and withhold federal grants from cities that shield illegal immigrants from federal immigration authorities.
"These laws will help to empower the federal government in partnership with local authorities to more easily locate and remove these violent individuals and prevent so-called sanctuary cities from receiving benefits from the very agency whose rules they are refusing to enforce," Sanders said.
"[President Donald Trump] looks forward to seeing these common sense proposals pass the House today, so we can be one step closer to helping fulfill his campaign promise to help stop these horrific crimes," she added.