White House officials are blaming Biden-era border policies for a Haitian illegal immigrant’s hammer killing of a Fort Myers mother as President Trump prepares a Florida midterm rally.
A White House spokeswoman told Fox News Digital the April attack outside a Fort Myers gas station is the direct result of prior open-border decisions, and the administration is spotlighting the case as President Donald Trump heads to southwest Florida.
Rolbert Joachim, a Haitian national, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of a female gas station clerk who was a mother of two teenage daughters. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Trump is scheduled to speak Friday at 2 p.m. at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Alico Arena in Fort Myers, with the November midterms on the horizon.
Department of Homeland Security accounts of the case describe a daylight attack captured on surveillance video. The footage showed the suspect smashing the woman’s windshield, then approaching her and repeatedly striking her in the head with a hammer.
Local charging details fill in the human cost. The New York Post reported that a Lee County grand jury indicted Rolbert Joachin, 40, in the killing of Fort Myers store clerk Nilufa Easmin, 51, after she confronted him for smashing her car window. State Attorney Amira Fox said prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
Fox described the crime in stark terms.
"This crime was so violent, so extreme, so unwarranted. It is something that once seen, is never to be forgotten... This defendant entered the United States illegally and brutally ended the life of a mother simply at her job, working to provide for her family... We will seek the death penalty in this case."
Fort Myers police enlisted Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help find the suspect. Officers arrested him on Mango Street. ICE lodged an immigration detainer, and DHS says he faces deportation regardless of how the criminal case ends.
DHS laid out the immigration timeline that the White House is now hammering. Joachim entered the United States in August 2022 and was released into the country under the Biden administration. A federal judge issued a final removal order against him that same year. He later received Temporary Protected Status. That status expired in 2024. He was still in the country when the Fort Myers clerk was killed in early April 2026.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis tied those decisions straight to the killing in comments to Fox News Digital.
"A few short months ago, an illegal alien barbarically killed a woman outside of a gas station in Fort Myers by hitting her on the head with a hammer multiple times."
She went further on the policy chain.
"This heinous murderer was RELEASED into the country by the Biden administration. Not only did the Biden administration release him into the country, but they then gave him Temporary Protected Status. This is the result of Democrats open-border policies. If you import the third world, you become the third world."
That is the frame the White House wants voters to hear in Lee County: release, protected status after a removal order, expired papers, then a mother dead outside her workplace.
In an April Truth Social post after the attack, Trump pointed at the same failure and at judges he said were blocking enforcement.
"This one killing should be enough for these Radical Judges to STOP impeding my Administration’s Immigration Policies."
He also called the surveillance video "one of the most vicious things you will ever see" and blamed the Biden administration for allowing the suspect into the country. Separate remarks quoted in later coverage struck the same note, calling the attacker an illegal alien criminal from Haiti released under Biden.
The White House is pairing that record with its own enforcement claims as Trump returns to the region. Officials say the current crackdown has produced 17 straight months without releases at the border and the deportation of more than 3 million people who were in the United States illegally.
Fort Myers is not neutral ground. Lee County backed Trump with 63.6% in 2024, while Kamala Harris took 35.3%. Trump’s statewide Florida margin grew from roughly one percentage point in 2016 to more than 13 points in 2024. A Friday speech at Alico Arena puts the immigration argument in front of a constituency that already shifted hard toward enforcement.
The sequence the White House wants on the table is simple and documented. A man enters in 2022. He gets released. A judge orders him removed. He receives temporary protected status anyway. That status lapses. He remains. A mother of two is beaten to death with a hammer at work. Police need ICE to help collar him. Prosecutors now want him executed.
Democrats who spent years defending catch-and-release and expansive parole and TPS categories have to answer for outcomes like this one when the video is public and the victim is a clerk supporting her family. The administration’s message is that sovereignty is not a slogan when the alternative is a hammer on a gas-station driveway.
Lawful residents and working parents should not have to hope a removal order actually means removal. When it does not, the bill comes due in places like Fort Myers, and voters are entitled to collect.
