The White House is tying a Fort Myers gas station clerk’s hammer killing to Biden-era border releases as President Trump prepares to rally in the same Florida city.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis pointed directly at the case as President Donald Trump headed back to Southwest Florida, where prosecutors have charged Haitian national Rolbert Joachim with first-degree murder in the April 3, 2026, attack outside a gas station.
Fox News reported that Joachim is accused of striking a female clerk, a mother of two teenage daughters, in the head with a hammer until she died, and that local prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Bis framed the killing as the predictable result of prior release-and-status decisions, not an isolated crime.
"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 did not stop at the attack itself.
"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."
The Department of Homeland Security described surveillance video of the attack in broad daylight. Officials said the footage shows the suspect smashing the woman’s windshield, then approaching her and repeatedly striking her in the head with a hammer.
Fort Myers police enlisted Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help find him. Officers later arrested Joachim on Mango Street.
DHS said 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, which expired in 2024.
After the arrest, ICE lodged an immigration detainer. DHS said he would face deportation regardless of how the criminal case ends.
That sequence is the core of the White House argument: a final removal order, a later grant of protected status, an expired status, and a mother of two dead outside a Florida gas station.
Prosecutors have since indicted Joachim on a first-degree murder charge and announced they will seek the death penalty.
Trump is scheduled to speak Friday at 2 p.m. at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Alico Arena in the Fort Myers area, with the Nov. 3 midterms on the calendar.
In an April Truth Social post after the killing, he 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.
He also wrote that the case should end judicial resistance to his enforcement agenda.
"This one killing should be enough for these Radical Judges to STOP impeding my Administration’s Immigration Policies."
The White House is now recycling the same case as it touts a sharper enforcement record. A White House release cited by the coverage claims Trump’s crackdown 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 sits in Lee County, where the 2024 presidential results were not close. Trump took 63.6% there. Kamala Harris took 35.3%.
Statewide, Trump’s Florida margin jumped from roughly one percentage point in 2016 to more than 13 points in 2024. The coming rally puts him back in a county that already rewarded a hard line on borders and crime.
The politics are straightforward. A gas-station clerk is dead. The man charged in her killing crossed in 2022, drew a removal order, later held Temporary Protected Status that expired in 2024, and remained in the country long enough to be arrested in Fort Myers after the hammer attack.
Bis cast that path as Democratic policy made concrete. Trump cast it as a reason for judges to stop blocking removals and interior enforcement. DHS cast the end state as criminal prosecution plus an ICE detainer and eventual deportation.
What the public record in the case still does not show is a stated motive, the victim’s name, or the full charging paperwork. It does show a mother of two killed outside her workplace, a first-degree murder indictment, a death-penalty bid, and an immigration history the White House is determined to put on the board before Trump takes the stage in the same city.
When a removal order is followed by protected status, and protected status is followed by a hammer attack on a working mother, voters do not need a lecture on incentives. They need the policy that left her unprotected to be treated as the failure it was.
