A six-year-old North Carolina girl is dead because the federal government keeps letting deported illegal immigrants walk back in. Jaime Santiago Corona, a Mexican national deported three separate times, was driving with a revoked license on July 3 when he blew through a stop sign in Pitt County and slammed his Dodge Ram into an SUV carrying 35-year-old Kelli Toler and her two children. Calli Toler, 6, was pronounced dead at the scene. Her mother and 4-year-old sibling were hospitalized with serious injuries. The family was on its way to grab lunch before heading to a pool.
This was not a bureaucratic oversight. This is the system working as designed — open door, no consequences, American lives be damned.
Corona has been deported three times and illegally reentered each time, a felony under federal law. He also has a history of DUI. Fox News reported that his criminal record includes a prior homicide-negligent manslaughter with a vehicle conviction, plus multiple counts of obstruction of police, DUI, failure to appear, and assorted traffic offenses. Let that sink in: a man who already killed someone with a vehicle in this country was deported, came back, was deported again, came back again, was deported a third time, came back a fourth time — and was still driving freely on North Carolina roads.
DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis called Corona "this monster" and said the tragedy was "100% preventable." She's right. It was preventable. It wasn't prevented because preventing it would require a government willing to enforce its own laws.
Corona was charged with misdemeanor death by vehicle, failure to stop at a stop sign, careless and reckless driving, and driving while his license was revoked. ICE has issued a detainer hold, and the Pitt County Sheriff's Office told Fox News it will cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Both the New York Post and Fox News covered the core facts of the crash and Corona's deportation history. Fox News provided the fuller picture of Corona's criminal record, including the prior vehicular homicide conviction — a detail that makes the government's failure even more staggering. The Post noted the fundraising page for the Toler family, which described the ordinary afternoon that turned fatal.
The question isn't how this happened. The question is how many times it has to happen before Washington treats the southern border like what it is — a sieve that lets repeat felons drift back into American communities at a cost measured in children's lives.
Three deportations. A prior vehicular homicide. A revoked license. And a six-year-old girl who never made it to the swimming pool. That's not a system failure. That's a system choice.
