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Trump Participates in an Angel Families Remembrance Ceremony, Feb. 23, 2026

February 23, 2026 · The White House · 0:57:18

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump hosted an Angel Families Remembrance Ceremony at the White House on February 23, 2026, joined by Americans who have lost parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren to crimes committed by illegal aliens — families he said the government had betrayed and the media had ignored for decades. “Under the Trump administration, their suffering is forgotten no longer,” he said.

At the ceremony he signed a proclamation designating February 22 as National Angel Family Day — a signing he said he had wanted to make since his first administration. The date marks the killing, on February 22, 2024, of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old Georgia nursing student whose name the Laken Riley Act carries; the President said that act had already resulted in more than 21,000 illegal-alien arrests, and he repeated his figure of 11,888 murderers allowed into the country by the prior administration. Laken’s mother, Allyson Philips, addressed the President from the podium: “You have said from the beginning, literally the day after this happened, that you would not forget about Laken. You weren’t president at that time and you have not forgotten.”

Former NYPD officer Ethan Curreri, who had arrested Riley’s killer for endangering the welfare of a child months before the murder and watched him released, told the room: “I did my job; I put him in custody. The system failed — no detainer, no accountability, no deportation, and an innocent American life was taken.” The President also thanked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Czar Tom Homan, saying the border was now “100 percent closed.”

Why it matters

The ceremony converted the Angel Families — long the moral witnesses of the administration’s immigration case — into a permanent date on the national calendar, signed in their presence two days before the President honored them again from the State of the Union podium. It is recorded on the Border & Immigration hub.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: a signing — the proclamation designating February 22 as National Angel Family Day — plus the Laken Riley Act arrest figure as stated by the President at the ceremony. The scoreboard entry itself remains review-gated.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in Angel Families Remembrance Ceremony,” The White House, February 23, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President and the speakers at the ceremony.