The father of a California girl who suffered severe injuries in a crash involving an undocumented truck driver criticized political rhetoric surrounding immigration enforcement during a recent congressional hearing.
Marcus Coleman attended a House Judiciary Committee hearing where former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem answered questions about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.
Coleman said remarks by some lawmakers opposing stricter enforcement were “insensitive” to families affected by crimes involving undocumented immigrants.
“At this point right now, what they’re doing is extremely disrespectful. It’s insensitive,” Coleman said. “Until it happens to them, that’s the point of view they’re going to have.”
During the hearing, Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, addressed families in attendance who had lost loved ones or whose relatives had been harmed in incidents involving undocumented immigrants.
“For the folks that are here and your families, I’m sorry,” Cohen said. “It’s terrible what happened to you, to your children or your family members.”
He added that statistical data suggests U.S. citizens are more likely to be victims of crimes committed by other citizens than by undocumented immigrants.
Noem responded that the remark was offensive to “Angel Families,” a term used to describe relatives of Americans killed by individuals in the country unlawfully.
“The vast majority of the people sitting behind me have lost their children due to drugs, overdoses from drugs that came over the southern border,” she said. “They died from their kids being hit in accidents on the roads where illegal drivers were driving a truck.”
Coleman’s daughter, Dalilah Coleman, was critically injured in June 2024 in southern California when an 18-wheel tractor-trailer struck a vehicle she was riding in. The truck was traveling about 60 miles per hour and failed to stop for traffic in a construction zone, authorities said.
Dalilah sustained a fractured skull, a broken femur and a traumatic brain injury.
Authorities identified the driver as Partap Singh, an undocumented immigrant from India who had obtained a commercial driver’s license in California. Coleman said the driver later returned to India and has not faced criminal prosecution in the United States.
“They go back home, like my daughter’s driver,” Coleman said. “He went back to India and he’s living life free. And my daughter’s dealing with this.”
Former President Donald Trump mentioned Dalilah’s case during his State of the Union address, drawing applause as she attended the event with her father.
Trump described the crash and criticized immigration policies he blamed for allowing the driver to be in the United States.
Immigration enforcement has become a central political issue, with Republicans citing cases involving crimes by undocumented immigrants to support stricter policies, while many Democrats argue such incidents are rare compared with overall crime rates.
During the hearing, Cohen referenced a 2024 Justice Department analysis using Texas data that found undocumented immigrants were less than half as likely as native-born Americans to be arrested for homicide.
He said the same pattern appeared for other offenses including assault, robbery, burglary and drug crimes.
“The facts show that most of the people that you have stopped and tried to deport have not committed any of those crimes,” Cohen said.
Coleman said he strongly disagreed with Cohen’s remarks and argued that statistics mean little to families directly affected by such incidents.
“To that family, it’s huge,” Coleman said. “But to the person it doesn’t happen to, it’s a small number.”