President Trump will sign a proclamation on Monday designating February 22 as "Angel Family Day," honoring the families of 62 individuals killed by illegal immigrants and two survivors in a solemn ceremony at the White House East Room.
The date carries particular weight. February 22, 2024, is the day Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student, was murdered while out jogging. Her death became a nationwide symbol of the human cost of a broken immigration system, and her name now sits atop the first piece of legislation Trump signed in his second term.
A special vigil is scheduled for 10 a.m. in the East Room. According to the NY Post, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Czar Tom Homan will join the families. The ceremony takes place one day before the president addresses the nation in his State of the Union, where he is expected to defend his agenda.
The proclamation puts names to a crisis that the previous administration spent years denying. Among those honored:
Sixty-two names. Each one represents a life taken by someone who should never have been in this country. Each one represents a family permanently shattered by a preventable crime.
Riley's mother, Allyson Phillips, who attended last year's State of the Union alongside Riley's sister, is scheduled to attend Monday's event. So is NYPD Officer Ethan Curreri, the officer who arrested Ibarra for child endangerment. Patty Morin, Rachel's mother, who made an impassioned plea from the White House briefing room last May, urging congressional Republicans to pass Trump's "big beautiful bill," will be there. Tammy Nobles, Kayla Hamilton's mother, will attend as well.
These women have spent years turning grief into advocacy. The White House is giving them the room they earned.
This is not just a ceremony. The proclamation sits atop a stack of concrete action. Trump signed the Laken Riley Act into law on January 29, 2025, the first bill of his second term. The law requires federal detention of illegal immigrants arrested for burglary or theft. The "big beautiful bill" that Patty Morin championed from the briefing room podium ultimately became law as well.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt framed the moment in a statement:
"President Trump is proud to have delivered accountability for Angel Families by ushering in the most secure border in history, deporting the criminal illegal aliens let into our country by prior Administrations, and upholding the rule of law by strongly enforcing our immigration laws."
Leavitt continued:
"The first bill President Trump signed into law was the Laken Riley Act to prevent these senseless tragedies from happening again and to keep innocent American citizens safe. The President and our nation will join Angel Families in honoring the memory of these amazing men and women."
A White House official described Monday's event as a "solemn ceremony that reminds us all of why deportations of the worst of the worst must continue."
For years, the previous administration and its media allies treated angel families as inconvenient props in a debate they wanted to keep abstract. The preferred vocabulary was "undocumented." The preferred framing was "root causes." The preferred posture was to treat enforcement as cruelty and illegal entry as a misunderstanding.
That framing required ignoring the bodies. It required looking past Laken Riley jogging on a path she should have been safe on, past Rachel Morin hiking a trail in Maryland, past Kayla Hamilton in her own home. It required treating every one of these deaths as a statistical anomaly rather than the predictable consequence of refusing to enforce the law.
The angel families never had that luxury. They buried their children. They sat through trials. They watched politicians who couldn't even say "illegal immigrant" out loud lecture them about compassion.
Monday's proclamation does something remarkably simple that Washington spent years refusing to do. It says their names. It assigns a day. It treats their loss as something that matters to the nation, not just to a grieving household.
The timing is deliberate and effective. By honoring these families the day before the State of the Union, the president anchors his Tuesday night address in human reality before he ever steps to the podium. Every policy argument about border security, deportation, and enforcement will carry the weight of sixty-two names read aloud in the East Room.
That is harder to dismiss than a chart. Harder to spin than a talking point. Harder to ignore than a policy paper.
The families who gathered in the White House on Monday did not choose to become symbols. They became symbols because the system failed, and their loved ones paid the price. The least a nation can do is remember them by name.