President Trump announced Tuesday that he has renamed a wildlife refuge in Texas after a 12-year-old girl he said was slain by two illegal immigrant gang members.
He designated the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge near Galveston to be named after Jocelyn Nungaray to honor a promise he said he made to her mother.
Alexis Nungaray looked down from the House chamber’s public gallery as Mr. Trump showed off the newly signed order to a joint session of Congress.
“I promised that we would always remember your daughter,” the president said.
Mr. Trump, in his address to Congress, also highlighted the family of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student whose death at the hands of an illegal immigrant last year helped boost immigration as a major issue in the 2024 campaign.
The first bill Mr. Trump signed this year was the Laken Riley Act, to require detention of illegal immigrants accused of certain crimes.
Mr. Trump went on to blast the Biden administration’s management of the border and celebrate his own early success in reducing the flow of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico boundary to the lowest numbers in history.
“We are achieving the great liberation of America,” the president declared.
He said his quick reversal of the border chaos undercut Democrats’ arguments, made over the last four years, that there was little Mr. Biden could do about the surge.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation,” Mr. Trump said. “It turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
Jocelyn was killed in June.
Two Venezuelan men have been charged in the killing. Mr. Trump said they are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
They were caught at the border and then released under relaxed Biden administration border policies.
Authorities also have linked Riley’s killer, Jose Ibarra, to TdA through his brother.
