Matthew Carney was 42 years old. He owned Smokin Thighs, a restaurant in Nashville. On the night of June 19, 2024, he walked into his own parking lot and caught a man stealing tools from his pickup truck.
He never came home.
The man in the parking lot was Ulises Raigoza-Martinez, a Mexican national in the country illegally. When Carney confronted him, Raigoza-Martinez didn't run. He got in his vehicle, struck Carney, pinned him to the hood, and then threw him from the car during a turn. Carney was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died. Raigoza-Martinez pleaded guilty to murder, theft, and tampering with evidence. Last week, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security official, didn't mince words: "This criminal illegal alien should never have been in our country to commit this heinous murder."
If Raigoza-Martinez had been stopped at the border, or deported after a previous encounter, or removed at any of the dozen points where enforcement could have intervened, Matthew Carney would still be running his restaurant.
His obituary described him as a man with "a loud laugh and his smile that lit up the room." His family — his wife Molly, his father Clifford, his mother Debra Taylor, his brother Adam, his sister Katelin Jeffers — buried a man who spent his free time on his boat, wrenching in the garage with his dog named Mr. Kitty, or out rock crawling in his side-by-side.
The open-borders crowd frames immigration enforcement as cruelty. They talk about "families being torn apart" by deportation. They never seem to talk about the families torn apart by the crimes that happen when enforcement doesn't exist. The Carney family didn't get a hearing. They didn't get a process. They got a phone call from a hospital.
Raigoza-Martinez wasn't some desperate asylum seeker fleeing violence. He was in a parking lot at night stealing tools. When the owner showed up, he chose murder over getting caught. That's not a misunderstanding. That's not a "broken system producing tragic outcomes." That's a man who entered the country illegally, committed a violent crime, and ended an American life.
And he got 20 years. He'll be out before he's elderly. Matthew Carney's family will never get him back.
