12.17.25
Naming names
Yesterday, the U.S. House narrowly passed H.R. 4371, the Kayla Hamilton bill. If it clears the Senate, the law would require unaccompanied migrant children over the age of 12 to be closely examined — possibly strip searched — at the border for gang tattoos and vetted for “criminal affiliation.” If found suspicious, they could be indefinitely detained.
Under the law, Health and Human Services would have to report to Homeland Security on the immigration status of everyone in the household planning to take in the child — usually one of their own children, nieces or nephews, or close family friends— and allow only U.S. citizens or green card holders to be hosts. Household members found without documentation would become targets of ICE arrests and deportation.
These children have made the journey to the U.S. without their parents or relatives, sometimes without any adults they know. They are traumatized, confused, and exhausted. Even those with “gang tattoos” (a large category, in HSA’s view —vis, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia) may be fleeing gang violence.
Like the rest of HSA policy, the legislation purports to be protecting people from violence but in fact is meant to deter or punish migration, including by children.
Said the international legal assistance and advocacy NGO KIND (Kids in Need of Defense) in a press release yesterday:
Together, these provisions threaten due process, family unity, and the safety and wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable children. [The bill] is out of step with well-established child welfare standards and ultimately endangers unaccompanied children.
Kayla Hamilton was a 20-year-old woman, diagnosed with autism, who was raped, tied up, and strangled in July 2022 in Aberdeen, Maryland, in the mobile home she shared with her boyfriend. The killer, who plead guilty and was sentenced to 70 years’ imprisonment, was a 16-year-old undocumented Salvadorian national named Walter Javier Martinez, who was alleged to be a member of the M-13 gang.
It is a hideous story—made even more poignant because Kayla left a voicemail message for her boyfriend just as Martinez showed up and threatened her.
Republicans have fetishized Hamilton ever since, just as they’ve made a fetish of all “victims of illegal alien crime,” as if “alien” crime were different from other crime.
In 2023, the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement of the House Subcommittee of the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee held hearings on Hamilton’s murder and released a report. It began:
Under the Biden Administration’s radical open-borders policies, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continue to allow dangerous criminal aliens into American communities.
On August 6, 2025, HSA Secretary Kristi Noem issued a press release officially honoring
the strength and resilience of victims affected by crimes committed by illegal aliens – families shattered by murder, children subjected to sexual abuse and exploitation, women brutalized, and law enforcement officers targeted simply for doing their jobs.
Naming twelve victims and detailing the abominations committed against them by “aliens,” the PR quoted the agency secretary:
ICE will continue to target the worst of the worst to protect American lives and make our country safe again.
At the end, it directed readers in need of support to ICE’s new Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement (VOICE) office.
In 2024 Kayla’s family sued Biden’s HSA and HHS for $100 million for her wrongful death.
HR 4371 follows in the tradition of naming draconian laws after victims of the most spectacular—and vanishingly rare—crimes. The practice may have begun in the wake of the satanic sex abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s, whose alleged crimes were 100 percent invented. Those early laws laid the foundation for today’s massive edifice of sex offender statute, which in turn has become the model for the most restrictive and punitive criminal legal regime in American history.
The Jacob Wetterling Act, named after an 11-year-old Minnesota boy abducted and murdered while riding his bike, required states to set up sex offender registries (his mother later became a crusader against the law). A 1996 amendment, Megan’s Law, a nine-year-old rape-murder victim, forced states to post those registries publicly and to notify neighbors when certain registrants move into a community. The 1996 Pam Lychner Sexual Offender Tracking and Identification Act, named after the adult victim of an attempted rape, created a federal database of sex offenders. Jessica’s Law, established in 2005 in Florida in the name of the 9-year-old victim of an abduction-murder by a convicted sex offender, significantly lengthened sentences and expanded the registry’s restrictions and surveillance.
The federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, probably the most consequential sex offense law yet, set up the national sex offender registry and significantly increased the number and scope of acts considered criminal, as well as mandatory minimum sentences. Six-year-old Adam was abducted and killed in Hollywood, Florida. Although the case was never solved and police told me there was no suspicion or evidence of sexual harm, it became the ur-tale of pedophilic stranger danger. Broadcasting that myth, Adam’s father, John, built a career as a TV crime-chaser.
As I said, such crimes are rare: One journalist extrapolating from federal crime statistics concluded that if you wanted to set a kid out alone to be abducted and killed, you’d have to wait 750,000 years.
A 2024 study by the National Institute of Justice found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes. Crime has fallen as immigration has risen. How many U.S. citizens are raped or killed by undocumented migrants? Kristi Noem found twelve—and you can bet her office searched far and wide.
Not that sex offenders against minors are any less reviled than ever—Jeffrey Epstein may single-handedly bring down the MAGA movement—but immigrants have lately taken center stage as the poster monsters for the cruelest criminal legislation.
And naming the laws after profoundly sympathetic victims works.
After yesterday’s vote on the Kayla Hamilton bill, Fox News headlined the story “201 House Dems vote against bill named after 20-year-old American killed by illegal immigrant teen.”