The cameras were installed several months ago in the most remote section of the Mama & Pa Heritage Trail, a popular route for joggers and cyclists that runs along the old Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad line between Bel Air and Forest Hill.
The surveillance system was welcomed by Harford County residents reeling from the murder of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five whose body was found in a wooded area near the trail last August.
But the suspect’s arrest last week not only rekindled the horror of the murders but also made the county the epicenter of the latest flare-up over the country’s immigration and border policies in a presidential election year, as the suspect entered the U.S. illegally four times in early 2023 through Texas and New Mexico.
Former President Donald Trump, who is expected to be this year’s Republican nominee, has used the incident to blast Democratic President Joe Biden’s flawed immigration policy. Democrats have blasted Republicans for rejecting a border security bill. Some Harford residents say they feel like political pawns.
The need for the cameras underscored the message that shocking crimes can happen anywhere, even in a county where scenic walks, parks and gardens offer residents idyllic retreats.
“We cannot escape this kind of violence anywhere in the country or the world, not even in quiet towns like Bel Air or Mama and Papa Trail,” Republican Barry Glassman, a former two-term Harford County commissioner, said Thursday.
Glassman said the US-Mexico border issue “has been a huge failure on the part of Congress, by both parties. It has become a political game. We’ve been through 20 years with no resolution.”
Glassman said the severity and high profile of the case reminded him of the 2016 murder of two sheriff’s deputies in Abingdon. It was the first murder of a deputy in more than a century. But the gunman died in a shootout with officers and his family said he had a mental illness. And it didn’t happen in the middle of a presidential election where immigration has already taken center stage.
Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said the suspect in Morin’s murder, Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, is from El Salvador and entered the U.S. illegally last year. He was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 14 and extradited to Maryland on Thursday.
Authorities believe Martinez-Hernandez, 23, killed a woman in El Salvador shortly before entering the U.S., Gahler told reporters. He also said DNA from Morin’s murder scene matched genetic material taken during a March 2023 robbery in Los Angeles in which a mother and her 9-year-old daughter were attacked.
Martinez-Hernandez is charged with Morin’s murder and rape. “Martinez-Hernandez stands before this courtroom presumed innocent,” his public defender, Amy Valdivia, told Judge Harford on Friday.
Rachel Morin Memorial
At a press conference where the Republican sheriff announced the suspect’s arrest, Sheriff Gahler briefly cited crimes in El Salvador and Los Angeles before quickly bringing up the issue of immigration: “To the people of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and to members of both Houses of Congress, here in Harford County we are 1,800 miles from our southern border and no American is safe because of our failed immigration policies.”
Trump spoke out quickly. His campaign released a statement saying Biden’s border policy “allowed” Martinez-Hernandez to enter the US and that the suspect “murdered the mother of five children while on the run in Maryland.” The day the defendant was returned to Harford, Trump called Morin’s mother to offer his condolences.
“I was deeply touched by President Trump’s kindness and concern,” Patty Morin said in a statement released by the family’s lawyer. “He was sincere and genuinely wanted to know how our family was coping. He asked about Rachel and expressed his sincere sympathy for her untimely death. His words have brought me comfort during this very difficult time.”
Democratic Gov. Wes Moore and his allies in Maryland’s Legislature said it was Republicans who twice rejected a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year over President Trump’s opposition. The bill, which Republicans shelved in a procedural vote, was aimed at reducing border crossings.
“My heart breaks for the Morin family,” said Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen. “The Morin family needs more than words. They need action.”
Republican-leaning Harford County voted for Trump over Biden in 2020 (54.6% to 42.6%) but was partly, if not entirely, critical of the incumbent president.
“If they had more control over the border and knew who was coming in, someone could have said, ‘Hey, don’t let him in,’ and this girl would still be alive,” said John Quinto, 55, a Bel Air Democrat who said he plans to vote for Trump.
Other residents expressed concern that Harford was being used for political purposes.
“There are now five kids who have lost their mother. This isn’t just a number. This has nothing to do with the political climate,” said Dan Strickland, 59, of Bel Air, who recalled years ago riding mountain bikes on the trails and playing paintball in the nearby woods. “Her name was Rachel. She was a mother and a sister.”
Sydney Gase, 28, who attended a Mom & Dad campaign event the day before Morin was killed, said she was more interested in answers than politics.
“I would like to know exactly what happened to Rachel and why, but this whole incident seems to have been turned into a political talking point about border control,” said Geis. Geis, a lifelong resident of Harford, said the attention on Morin has faded since the suspect was arrested.
“I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes of the people who were affected and I really think we need to look at them as human beings,” Geis said. “Is this about Rachel, is this about figuring out what happened and why it happened, or is this about politics?”
“This is the second time in two years that an innocent woman from Harford County has had her life taken by a criminal wrongfully in our country,” Gahler told reporters on June 15. He was referring to the 2023 murder of 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton, which led to the arrest of a 17-year-old undocumented juvenile.
The sheriff has previously complained about Democratic policies, accusing state lawmakers of supporting “pro-criminal, anti-police” bills in the 2023 Democratic-controlled Legislature.
While President Trump has made the border a central issue, other Republicans and Democrats have also taken to the issue. President Biden recently imposed tough restrictions on immigrants seeking asylum in the United States and then offered a path to citizenship to about 500,000 people without legal status who are married to U.S. citizens and have lived in the country for more than 10 years.
Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Andy Harris, who represents the same district, reiterated his comments on the social media platform X-Girlar that “Americans are not safe because of failed immigration policies.”
Flavio Hickel, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington on the Eastern Shore, said it wasn’t surprising that the Morin case has become a topic of national discussion.
“Anti-immigrant sentiment sells any time people are worried about the economy,” Hickel said. “It’s something Trump has always excelled at, and now is a time when it’s even more pronounced.”
Trump has also blamed Biden’s “open borders” policies for the February death of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was beaten to death while out on her morning run. The man charged was Jose Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan migrant.
Jennica Rallison, executive director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore, said it’s a mistake to call the border “open.” She said Biden had not lifted the Trump administration’s Title 42 program, which had prevented would-be border crossers from seeking asylum in the United States until May 2023, to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“This narrative of a lawless western border is a completely different picture to what’s actually happening,” she said.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Martinez-Hernandez attempted to enter the U.S. four times in 2023, when Title 42 was in effect. ICE said he “illegally” entered the country on his fourth attempt on Feb. 13, 2023. Gahler said Martinez-Hernandez moved around the U.S. working odd jobs, staying in Virginia as well as Maryland, California and Oklahoma. Morin’s indictment said he was living with relatives in Maryland until just last month, and that the relatives were assisting the investigation.
During Friday’s hearing, Harford County State’s Attorney Allison Healey said Martinez-Hernandez is wanted on an international arrest warrant for a murder that happened around December 2022 outside a bar in El Salvador.
Harford County has a small Latino and immigrant population overall, according to 2020 Census data. The census found that 5.4% of Harford County’s population, or about 14,000 people, are Hispanic or Latino.
Outside Supermercado Campos, an Aberdeen grocery store and restaurant, there’s a billboard advertising international money transfer services, and rows of Latin American produce like maseca and papaya lead to taquerias and pupuserias.
A woman who was at the facility Wednesday, on the condition of anonymity due to safety concerns, said she noticed “discriminatory” comments written underneath a post about Morin that had been shared on Facebook.
“We are not all the same,” the woman from El Salvador said in Spanish. “We all came here to work. Some of us came to break the law.” Her immigration status is unknown.
She said it was unfair to paint all immigrants as criminals when “there are good people and bad people in the world.”
Kathleen Paul, public policy director for Maryland immigrant rights group CASA, said it’s “heartbreaking” to see leaders use Morin’s death to make sweeping, fear-based generalizations about immigrants.
“That will lead to even more harmful policies that do more harm than good,” Paul said.
Recent studies, including a 2024 report by Northwestern University economist Elisa Jacomet and others, have found that immigrants are consistently less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. A study the previous year by Stanford University’s Economic Policy Institute reached the same conclusion, saying immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S.
Harford County has fewer organizations and agencies that support immigrants than the greater Baltimore area or the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. For example, unlike Baltimore County, which has an immigration chief and a New Americans Task Force, and Baltimore City, which has the Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs, Harford County does not have a specific government agency that liaises with immigrant communities.
The county’s Community Resource Guide lists organizations that serve immigrants and refugees primarily in Baltimore, Washington and Northern Virginia. The exception is a Bel Air organization called LASOS Inc. (Linking All So Others Succeed), which offers services such as English as a second language instruction and bilingual youth programs.
Hickel, the University of Washington professor, said the debate over immigration in Maryland and elsewhere is ongoing, but he doubts many have reached any conclusions.
“Most people don’t move,” he said. “They’re already wired to support one party or the other.”
