A grief-stricken mother recounted a heartbreaking story of her daughter’s murder during a congressional hearing this week on immigration and border security.

Rachel Morin was a Maryland mother of five found raped and murdered on a popular trail in August 2023.

The victim’s mother, Patty Morin, told lawmakers that her family had walked that trail for more than 25 years.

“She grew up walking this trail,” Patty Morin said of her daughter. “We were told that her body was blanketed in bruises, and I can tell you from looking at her when I went to the funeral home that it was probably the most graphic thing that I’ve ever seen.”

It took 10 months for authorities to track down the suspect, Victor Martinez Hernandez, who had entered the country illegally earlier in 2023.

Patty Morin said police found her daughter’s suspected killer by using DNA because he had also allegedly attacked a child and her mother in California.

“If they had done the border protocols that were in place — just a simple DNA swab — they would have known that he had a(n) Interpol warrant for murder in his home country,” Patty Morin said. “That’s why he was fleeing to the United States. They say that the borders are safe. We live 1,800 miles away from the southern border. They’re not safe.”

Patty Morin, who also testified this month before the House Judiciary Committee, was one of four witnesses Wednesday at the House Committee on Homeland Security hearing.

She was joined by San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, retired Border Patrol official Aaron Heitke, and Arizona Sheriff David Hathaway.

Committee Chair Rep. Mark Green, a Republican from Tennessee, said the purpose of the hearing was to examine President Joe Biden’s border policies and “how they have undermined the safety and security of America.”

Green said we’re now seeing the worst border crisis in American history.

He accused the administration of implementing a mass catch-and-release policy, emboldening gangs, and costing states and cities billions of dollars.

Green said there’s a “national security, public safety, and humanitarian disaster at our borders.”

Since Biden’s first full month in office, Customs and Border Protection has recorded 10.3 million encounters of inadmissible immigrants, Green said. That’s compared to 3.1 million between fiscal years 2017 and 2020.

The Republican committee chair said there’s been 2 million known “got-aways” under Biden’s watch.

Mass parole programs solve the optics of overcrowded border facilities but result in millions of immigrants being released into the country, he said.

Green called it “a shell game.”

Green said Border Patrol arrests of immigrants with criminal backgrounds have more than doubled.

Ranking Member Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, urged lawmakers to be careful with the rhetoric they use to discuss immigration and border security.

Thompson mentioned the dozens of bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, after former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, spread unsubstantiated rumors of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets there.

Thompson mentioned an attack five years ago that targeted a Hispanic community at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, carried out by a self-described white nationalist. He mentioned the attack that claimed 10 lives in a predominantly Black community in Buffalo, New York, and the deadly antisemitic attack in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 lost their lives.

“Anti-immigrant rhetoric and racist tropes should have no place in our public discourse,” Thompson said. “They are un-American and too often they have helped fuel real-world violence against immigrants and minority communities across the country.”

Thompson said since Biden announced new actions to secure the border in June, encounters along the border and at ports of entry have decreased by 55%. Border Patrol recorded the lowest number of border encounters since September 2020, he said.

Biden has removed more than 92,000 immigrants to more than 130 countries and conducted over 300 international repatriation flights, Thompson said.

The Democratic lawmaker said total removals and returns over the last year exceeded total removals and returns for any year since 2010.

None of those Biden administration actions are a substitute for congressional action, Thompson said.

“It is our responsibility to act,” to fix what Thompson called a “broken immigration system” and to provide more border security resources.

Heitke, the retired chief patrol agent, told lawmakers that the only true consequence we have to discourage people from coming into the U.S. illegally is to send them back to their home countries. But he said he saw a steady decrease in the countries we could send people back to over the last several years.

“For the first time in my 25 years, and under five different administrations, whether through neglect or on purpose, I saw a large-scale lapse in our ability to return people to their country of origin,” he testified.

The inability to send people back to their countries meant most immigrants would have to be detained or released into the U.S., he said.

Heitke said the Biden administration decreased the amount of detention space — and as news spread in other countries that immigrants were being released into the U.S., more came, he said.

“As this happened, the numbers the Border Patrol encountered illegally crossing the border increased exponentially,” Heitke said. “The impact to me and my agents were significant.”

Sectors of the Border Patrol were ordered to take in all the immigrants they encountered, he said.

Border agents saw groups of hundreds and thousands coming into the U.S. and turning themselves in, which pulled 80% or more of the agents on duty away from the border.

Some border zones had no agents present for weeks and months at a time, he said.

“Those who did not want to be caught could simply walk in,” Heitke said. “We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time.”

Heitke said the San Diego sector saw an increase in what are called Special Interest Aliens (SIAs), who could have ties to terrorism.

Before, that sector averaged 10 to 15 SIA arrests a year, he said. Once word was out about what he characterized as an open border, Heitke said San Diego recorded over 100 SIA arrests in 2022 with the trend continuing.

Heitke said the Biden administration recently asked for help from Mexico, and that’s helped slow the flow of migrants. But he questioned why, in his view, it took the Biden administration so long to act.

Desmond, the San Diego County supervisor, testified that his metro has seen over 155,000 adult migrants, mostly men, bused and dropped onto their streets in a span of time from last September to this June.

That’s an average of about 600 a day, he said.

San Diego County spent $6 million in local dollars to set up a migrant receiving center to assist those dropped there and help move them more quickly to other parts of the country, according to Desmond.

Hathaway, the Arizona sheriff, said his border community of Santa Cruz County is safe. “But there are things that Congress can do, and you need to act,” he said.

Hathaway called on Congress to build a robust guest worker program.

Migrants generally come here wanting to work, he said, but asylum-seekers can’t even work for the first six months they’re in the country. He said we need immigration judges right at the border.

Hathaway was asked about the economic impacts of migrants, to which he said they’re beneficial to the U.S. The sheriff said there’s a “racist component” to some of the talk and approaches to border security.

“I hate to use the ‘R’ word. It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the racism word,” Hathaway said. “There’s a xenophobic aspect to this. There was never a proposal to build a wall on the northern border, on the Canadian border. There was never any intent to aggressively enforce Title 42 on the Canadian border. So there is this kind of racist component to it that we kind of all ignore. But it’s there smoldering in the background.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, took issue with Hathaway’s assessment.

Greene said there are 77 major border walls around the world, with 45 countries planning and building more.

“Walls are not racist,” Greene said. “Walls keep people safe.”

Lawmakers on both sides traded blame.

Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York, blamed Republicans for killing what he called the “most conservative border security immigration bill that’s ever been agreed to by any Democratic administration,” referencing the failed Senate immigration bill.

Green, the Republican committee chair, called the Senate immigration bill “crappy” and just an excuse for the Democrats to say they did something to solve the problem.

“This administration is just as unwilling to end this border crisis as it was when we began these investigations,” Green said.

Raising his voice, Green accused Biden and Democrats of ignoring the problems he said are caused by an influx of migrants.

“They bring up the cat story,” Green said, referencing the Ohio pet-eating rumors. “I don’t care about that. I care about Laken Riley, who is dead. I care about your daughter who is dead. Let’s talk about that. Instead, they’re talking about all this other stuff that just doesn’t matter.”

Rep. Lou Correa, a Democrat from California, thanked Patty Morin for attending the hearing. Correa opened up about his own wife getting attacked some years back while on a jog.

Correa said Rachel Morin’s story should never be forgotten.

“I don’t care which side of the party you’re on, I don’t care which side of the immigration issue you’re on, we have to stop this,” he said.

Correa also said Congress needs to address problems with the immigration system, which involves migrants from various walks of life.

“There’s basically three buckets of individuals right now,” Correa said. “You have the new asylum refugees. You have people that have been here 20, 30 years, Dreamers, people in the military. And then you have people that do concern us when it comes to terrorism. But under the existing legal framework, we’re not solving any of those problems.”