The Trump administration has named Angel Dad Joe Abraham, whose 20-year-old daughter was killed in a drunken hit-and-run by an illegal immigrant in Illinois, as the new executive director of ICE's victims-assistance office.
Abraham will lead the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office, the federal program inside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that connects families harmed by illegal alien crime with support services and case information. The appointment, Fox News Digital first reported, places a grieving father at the helm of an office that exists because of families like his.
In January 2025, a Guatemalan national named Julio Cucul-Bol caused a drunken driving hit-and-run crash in the Chicago area that killed Katie Abraham, 20, and her friend Chloe Polzin. Cucul-Bol later pleaded guilty to aggravated driving under the influence resulting in death and leaving the scene of a fatal crash. A judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
The crash, and the fact that the driver was a criminal illegal immigrant living in a sanctuary state, turned Joe Abraham into one of the most visible advocates for stricter immigration enforcement in the country. He is now credited as the inspiration behind Operation Midway Blitz, the sweeping Chicago-area federal immigration enforcement operation that ran from September through December 2025 and netted more than 4,000 arrests, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Abraham did not frame the appointment as a policy job. He framed it as an extension of the worst thing that ever happened to his family.
"I am excited to accept the Executive Director role at VOICE because this is not simply a government position for me, it is deeply personal and rooted in a mission I have come to understand through unimaginable loss."
He added that he wants to use his experience and what he learned through Katie's story to make sure victims and their families "are heard, treated with dignity and never become an afterthought in our immigration system."
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis called Abraham "the perfect choice" to run the office.
"Since the murder of his daughter, Katie, in a drunk driving hit-and-run in sanctuary Illinois, he has been a staunch advocate for victims of illegal alien crime and a powerful critic of the Democrats' sanctuary policies."
Bis characterized Katie Abraham's death as a "murder." The criminal charge Cucul-Bol pleaded guilty to was aggravated driving under the influence resulting in death, not a murder charge. Bis also said Abraham would "help countless families who lost a loved one to a preventable tragedy caused by open-border policies."
The VOICE office has its own political history. President Trump directed DHS to revive it upon taking office for his second term in January 2025. The Biden administration had shuttered the program. Trump's DHS reestablished it in April 2025.
Since reopening, the office has fielded 897 total calls from victims, family members, and advocates. It has helped 588 victims seeking assistance and information and assisted 185 victim family members seeking services, according to a DHS data report published in June.
The numbers paint a picture of the crimes driving those calls. Assault accounted for 35 percent of the most frequently reported offenses. Rape and sexual assault made up 17 percent. Homicide and manslaughter accounted for 10 percent.
Those are not abstract statistics. Each call represents a person or a family dealing with a crime committed by someone who should not have been in the country in the first place. Abraham's job will be to make sure the federal government treats them as more than a case number.
Abraham's appointment lands in the middle of a long-running feud between the Trump administration and Illinois over the state's sanctuary policies. Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has refused to cooperate with federal immigration officials, and the clash has produced one confrontation after another.
In May, an illegal immigrant convicted of child sexual abuse was released from an Illinois jail despite calls for state officials to turn him over to ICE. Bis, then serving as DHS assistant secretary, responded by publicly challenging Pritzker's record.
"Governor Pritzker continues to refuse to do his job to protect his citizens from illegal alien crime and instead chooses to smear our law enforcement. Where is the investigation into his own policies that allowed this pedophile to be released from jail and be loose in Illinois communities?"
Pritzker, for his part, called for criminal investigations into ICE agents over their conduct during Operation Midway Blitz. The governor chose to investigate the enforcers rather than the policies that left a convicted child sex offender free to walk out of a county jail.
That pattern, state officials shielding illegal immigrants from federal custody, then attacking the federal agents who step in, is exactly the dynamic that turned Joe Abraham from a grieving father into a national figure. His daughter died in a state that made a policy choice to limit cooperation with immigration enforcement. The man who killed her was a criminal illegal alien living in the consequences of that choice.
Operation Midway Blitz became the federal government's most aggressive immigration enforcement action in the Chicago area in years. Running from September through December 2025, the operation produced more than 4,000 arrests. Residents and protesters clashed with U.S. Border Patrol agents and other federal agents in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood on October 23, 2025.
Abraham is credited as the inspiration behind the operation. His advocacy after Katie's death put a spotlight on the gap between Illinois sanctuary policy and the real-world cost borne by families who live under it. The operation was the federal government's answer.
Now Abraham moves from outside advocate to inside official. His wife, Michelle Abraham, has also been publicly visible in the cause, appearing in a DHS video remembering their late daughter.
The VOICE office gives Abraham a platform to do at scale what he has done since January 2025 on his own: make sure the victims of illegal alien crime have someone in government who picks up the phone.
Washington is full of political appointees who talk about public service in the abstract. Joe Abraham buried his daughter. The difference matters.
