Grieving Mom Says Trump Made Three-Word Promise After Daughter Killed By Illegal

When Jennifer Bos saw President Donald Trump at a White House event, she did not expect to speak. But as he walked past, she called out to him, twice. What followed, she says, was a brief exchange that would come to define her view of his presidency.

Bos is the mother of Megan Bos, a 37-year-old woman from Antioch, Illinois, who was reported missing in February 2025. Two months later, authorities discovered her body in a trash container behind a home in Waukegan. Investigators said the container had been filled with bleach. The body was partially decomposed when it was found.

Prosecutors alleged that Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, 52, who was living at the home, kept Megan’s body in his basement for several days before moving it to the bleach-filled container, where it remained for weeks. He was charged with abuse of a corpse, concealing a death and obstructing justice.

Under Illinois’ SAFE-T Act, those charges were initially considered non-detainable. Mendoza-Gonzalez was released after his first court appearance. The decision drew criticism from Megan’s family and renewed debate over the state’s criminal justice reforms and sanctuary policies.

“My daughter had been missing for two months. We were searching frantically for her, and she was ultimately discovered in the backyard, in a garbage can full of bleach, of an illegal immigrant in Lake County, Illinois. And he was arrested that day, and he spent the night in jail. He went to court the next morning and was released immediately afterward to just go back home,” Bos said to Fox News.

The release, she said, prompted her to act when she later attended a White House bill signing ceremony. Positioned along the path where Trump was exiting, she called out to him.

“I was right along the path he was walking out. I don’t know what came over me, but I just shouted out, ‘Mr. President’ twice, and he turned around, and he looked at me, and I gave him the briefest roundabout of the story that I could in that little bit of time, and he shook his head. You could just see the disgust in his face.”

Within days, Bos said, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Mendoza-Gonzalez and transferred him to a detention facility in Indiana.

“They weren’t going to hold him, but they weren’t also going to report him. They were going to let this man, a person who’s willing to do something so nefarious, and just let him go back home into the community. It’s unbelievable,” she said.

Bos was later invited to the White House as part of a memorial ceremony honoring “Angel Families,” a term used for families of Americans killed in crimes involving immigrants in the country illegally. She described the event as “moving.”

“I could feel how important that we are to [Trump] when we aren’t important to anyone else, that means everything,” she said.

At the 2026 State of the Union address, Trump referenced Megan Bos by name during a broader tribute to victims and their families. Jennifer Bos was seated in the gallery with other Angel Families as lawmakers acknowledged them. In his remarks, Trump promised justice for victims and called for stricter immigration enforcement.

Bos has contrasted her experience in Washington with what she describes as silence from state leaders in Illinois. Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker “has never once mentioned Megan’s name, he’s never acknowledged what happened, he’s never reached out to me,” she said.

“You have victims like my Katie, who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this is just a predictable ending of reckless, arrogant policies that to this day, Democratic leadership, looks like to me, from a state to state level will not pause or scale back,” he said.

“I talked to [Trump] for 20 seconds, 30 seconds, maybe. And in that amount of time, he knew exactly what I needed, and then he did it,” she said. “I’m just, you know, your average American mom, grandma, I’m nobody, and he listened to me, and he felt it was important enough to help me. I just think that right there, that’s what makes a president.”