Time to Remind Sen. Corey Booker of Newark's MS-13 Massacre

Lying Viciously About ICE Will Only Result in More Victims

In 2007, when Sen. Corey Booker was the ambitious reform mayor of Newark, New Jersey, he witnessed up close the after effects of arguably the most horrific crime committed by illegal aliens on American soil. He consoled the parents of the victims, promised them justice, stated that he felt “broken” by the incident, and initiated a crackdown on violent crime.

Even in 2007, however, the politically savvy Booker knew enough to steer the conversation away from the illegal status of the killers or their affiliation with MS-13. By 2026, his disingenuousness had morphed into a pathological dishonesty. On Monday, just days after an illegal alien shot and killed college freshman Sheridan Gorman in Chicago, he delivered a stunningly vile diatribe about ICE at Newark airport where ICE agents were helping travelers get through security.

Sheridan Gorman in Chicago, the city that betrayed her.

Said a hysterical Booker about President Trump, “He’s taking the very same agency that has been bursting into our schools, into our churches, into our hospitals, into our courts, and even into the homes of Americans.” Trump was doing so, fulminated Booker, “under the lie that this is somehow going to help with the long lines that he created in the first place….This is an outage.”

It did not take long for ICE honcho Tom Homan to fire back. “He’s misleading the American people. He’s lying,” said Homan about Booker. “I want him to give me one example, just one, when ICE went into a church to arrest somebody, or we went into a hospital to arrest somebody, or we went into an elementary school to arrest somebody. Just give me one example. You know why. He can’t because there isn’t any.”

Homan conceded that in one case agents in “hot pursuit” followed a criminal into a school, but he made no apologies for their doing so. He also noted that Don Lemon and friends were the only ones to invade a church. And, of course, as even the media acknowledge, it is the Democrats who have blocked funding for DHS.

For those of your friends who might believe Booker it is a good time to remind them of what happened needlessly under his watch on August 4, 2007. On that steamy evening, Peruvian Jose Carranza and five of his amigos were drinking and smoking marijuana in a Newark schoolyard. There they spied four young black students, two of them female, talking and playing music and judged them easy prey.

Iofemi Hightower and Terrance Aerial at their 2006 high school prom

This was not a rival gang, nothing like it. Dashon Harvey, 20, was entering his junior year at Delaware State University. Terrence Aeriel, 18, was to begin at Delaware State the following month. Natasha Aeriel, then 19, also attended Delaware State. Iofemi Hightower, 20, was holding down two jobs while she saved to attend college.

Sensing trouble, the four young people promptly headed to Natasha’s car, but it was too late. The men surrounded them before they could drive away and at gunpoint forced them to the ground.

They separated Natasha from the others and began to molest her sexually. “All I could keep doing was saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’” Natasha would later testify. “It probably was a little too loud because somebody told me to shut the fuck up.’‘

One of the gang members put his knee in Natasha’s back and tickled her throat with a machete. It was then that Natasha heard Carranza and his crew kill the three others execution style with gunshots to the back of the head. Upon seeing her own blood, Natasha summoned the will to push off her attacker who shot her and left her for dead. She survived to finger the attackers.

Today, few remember this horror, even in Newark. There were no TV movies, no Dateline NBC, no bestsellers. The media gatekeepers succeeded in keeping this story out of the national news for the simple reason it served no useful political purpose. Six months before the playground massacre, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president. Obama had promised to bridge racial divides, and the last thing the media wanted to provoke was a rift in his base between blacks and Hispanics especially on the subject of illegal aliens.

Carranza’s arrest came a little too late for the young people he murdered

At the time of the murders, Carranza was out on bail. He was awaiting trial in two separate cases, one the sexual assault of a five-year-old girl. Newark authorities knew he was in the country illegally, but they chose not to notify immigration officials of either arrest. They never did. Newark gloried in its unofficial status as a sanctuary city, much as Chicago does today.

Chicago authorities knew that Sheridan Gorman’s killer, Jose Medina, was in the country illegally. When the Venezuelan was arrested for shoplifting, local officials released him back into the community rather than turn him over to ICE. He repaid their kindness by shooting the 18-year-old Gorman in the back as she, like the young people in Newark, tried to flee.

Gorman’s family understood something that Democrats refuse too. “When systems fail — whether through release decisions, lack of coordination, or unwillingness to act — the consequences are not abstract. They are real,” the family said in a statement. “And in our case, they are permanent.” While the media busily bury the story, the Gormans will bury their daughter.

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