Janet Arce was living in Harford County when Bel Air resident Rachel Morin was ambushed, raped and killed as she tried to go for a run on the Ma & Pa Trail in August 2023.
It took authorities ten months to find and capture their main suspect, Victor Hernandez Martinez of El Salvador, in Oklahoma, and extradite him to Maryland, where he faces trial on murder charges in Harford Circuit Court beginning Friday.
The county’s Latino community was as grief-stricken and as fearful as everyone else in the wake of the crime, says Arce, a Puerto Rican native who has spent 30 years supporting Spanish-speaking immigrants in Maryland. And with the high-profile proceeding about to start, they’re feeling tense, worried the spotlight will reflect on them.
“People are following this trial very closely,” she says. “People are hurt. She was a young mom of five children. It’s just heartbreaking. Everyone agrees that if you come to this country and commit a crime, you deserve to pay the penalty.
“At the same time, it’s like – how can I say it? – people look at us like we’re [all] criminals or gang members. That is not the case. We also feel the pain, and we think, ‘Wow’ – this makes us all look bad.”
The killing of Morin is far from the only violent crime committed by individuals in the country illegally that have grabbed headlines and left American familes shattered. Nor is it the first to be seized on by politicians who favor stricter immigration polices.
The fatal shooting of California woman Kate Steinle by a Mexican national in 2015 sparked fierce criticism and debate over San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy, which bars local officials from questioning a resident’s immigration status. Donald Trump was one of several Republican presidential candidates who made the case an issue in 2016.
Two years later, University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts was killed by an undocumented immigrant while jogging. A Venezuelan national who was in the country illegally was convicted in November of killing 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, in February of last year, and two others from Venezuela are facing capital murder charges in the rape and killing of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas last June.
Trump made those and other cases cornerstones of his argument for stiffer immigration policies on the campaign trail last year, and the message resonated: most voters listed concerns about immigration as one of their two top concerns. the Pew Research Center found that 56% of registered voters favored mass deportations of immigrants who are living in the country illegally.
The Trump adminstration, of course, has followed through. A White House spokesman announced this week that it had deported more than 100,000 immigrants in the country illegally since January.
The 45th and now 47th president made Morin’s case a prominent part of the argument. He invited Morin’s brother, Michael, to speak at the Republican National Convention in June, where he blamed Harris-Biden administration policies for her death, and Morin’s mother, Patti, has appeared with Trump several times to back his administration’s hard-line policies.
The American Immigration Council and other critics point to numerous studies that show immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are statistically less likely to commit violent crimes in the United States than native-born Americans, and many have accused the President and GOP of exploiting tragedies to paint immigrants in the worst possible light.
Sheri Hoidra makes no such accusation, but she does fear that politicians can and will use a case like Morin’s to work up support for ill-advised immigration legislation
A immigration attorney with a roster of clients in Harford County, Hoidra says the times are so sensitive that few in her field, let alone Maryland immigrants, are willing to talk about their views on issues that affect their communities. The sentiment among her clients is overwhelming that the crimes against Morin were shocking and heartbreaking and that they want justice to be done, she said, but most are also wary of being viewed as suspect simply because they’re Latino.
And as an attorney, Hoidra is worried that conservative lawmakers will use the understandably powerful emotions around the Morin case to gin up support for bills she says would violate the rights of both documented and undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are productive, law-abiding members of their communites.
Hoidra, currently the chair of the immigration law section of the Maryland State Bar Assocation, has appeared in Annapolis to oppose two bills before the General Assembly that would alter the legal framework local and federal law enforcement have been using to deal with suspected illegal immigrants in the state since 2021.
The Dignity Not Detention Act, passed that year, barred Maryland and its local jurisdictions from entering into agreements with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for immigration detention, essentially barring the state from participating in federal detention programs. It also prohibited state and local actors from inquiring about an individual’s immigration status.
Hoidra has testified against both House Bill 85, sponsored by State Delegate Nino Mangione (R- Baltimore County), which would remove many of those restrictions on local agents, and House Bill 1188, which would compel further cooperation by local law enforcement with ICE opposes
Harford County, meanwhile, is one of three Maryland counties that have adopted ICE’s 287 (g) program, which grants state and local police the authority under federal law to “identify and process removable aliens.”
Critics say the power is too broad, that few local agents are trained to make such judgements, and that it too easily allows for racial and other profiling.
“I think the community is concerned because [politicians] are using the name of an individual who was, obviously, horrifically killed,” says Hoidra, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Iran. “The accused person was undocumented, sure. But to use that fact to say ‘we’re going to have Maryland police act as ICE agents and give them the right to ask questions about immigration status,’ that scares people. Among other things, it will keep people from feeling okay about reporting crimes to police. It has a significant ripple effect through the whole community.”
One local cleric who works closely with immigrants says virtually everyone in the Spanish-speaking community hopes that anyone who commits the kind of crime Morin’s assailant did are dealt with severely — even more so, perhaps, if they’re Latino.
“With all the controversy over immigration, and given all the executive orders [Trump] has been signing, there’s a clear line among our people that if you’re a criminal, you have to be out of here,” says Bishop Angel Nuñez, longtime pastor of the Bilingual Christian Church of Baltimore. “And if he’s found guilty, he should not be sent back to his home country so he could just come back here and do the same thing again.
“He belongs in jail,” says Nuñez, who also serves as vice president of the National Hispanic Pastors Alliance, a consortium of more than 800 churches in the U.S. “Those are the kind of thoughts people have.”
Closer to the trial venue, meanwhile, Pablo Hernandez says Latinos will be keeping a close eye on the proceedings.
Hernandez, a U.S. military veteran who volunteers at a Spanish-speaking church in Edgewood, reiterates that most in the community fear that too many are associating the person who killed Morin with a broader Latino community that has had a presence in the county dating to the 1980s and that is as horrified by his actions as anyone.
“People speak about the crime — how bad, how violent it was, and especially about the repercussions to the children of the murdered young lady. They’re also speaking about how even though we don’t live in the city, we’re not immune from crime, how even the places we thought of as safe aren’t safe any more. We have to remain vigilant,” he says.
Have a news tip? Contact Jonathan M. Pitts at jonpitts@baltsun.com.
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