On July 1, 2015, a thirty-two-year-old woman named Kathryn Steinle was killed by a stray bullet on a pier in San Francisco. The shooter was a middle-aged Mexican man, an ex-felon who’d been deported from the U.S. multiple times but had been released by local law enforcement after a recent arrest, despite the objections of federal immigration authorities. San Francisco is a sanctuary city, meaning that it limits the coöperation of local law enforcement with federal immigration agents. After Steinle’s murder, both Republicans and Democrats—including Hillary Clinton—condemned the city’s handling of the case, and the matter quickly turned into a debate over sanctuary cities. Later that month, Steinle’s father, who had been walking with her when she was shot, testified at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was joined by the family members of others who’d been killed by undocumented immigrants. Three of these other families were associated with a group called the Remembrance Project, an upstart nonprofit that, with the election of Donald Trump, now finds itself with a direct channel to the highest level of American power

Last week, when Trump signed two executive orders on immigration, in the Oval Office, he was flanked by a half-circle of smiling supporters. At one end of the group stood the founder and president of the Remembrance Project, a thin, dark-haired Texan named Maria Espinoza. The Remembrance Project calls itself “a national organization that advocates for families of victims killed by illegal aliens.” Lady Justice is its mascot. But organizations that monitor American hate groups have followed Espinoza for years, and they’ve raised concerns about her work. “She and the activists and organizations she associates with demonize immigrants and provide a platform for bigotry,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a 2014 report.

Since its founding, in 2009, one of the Remembrance Project’s main policy concerns has been the existence of sanctuary cities. Establishment conservatives see these cities as an affront to federal order. But the nativist right has long viewed them as something more sinister and dangerous—as pockets of wholesale criminal impunity. In Espinoza’s words, the pervasiveness of immigrant crime means that “every state is a border state.” On Wednesday, when the new President signed an order that threatens to penalize sanctuary cities by withholding federal money from them, it marked a major success for the Remembrance Project and its allies. During the signing ceremony, a photograph captured Espinoza looking over Trump’s shoulder, her hands clasped expectantly. “Our country,” she told me by e-mail, “now has a President who will place ‘Americans first.’ ”

If Espinoza was feeling pleased, she had every reason to be. As journalists and pundits scrutinized the language of Trump’s executive orders last week, two of the policy steps the orders included attracted particular attention. One called for the creation of an “Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens,” and the other ordered the issuance of a weekly national report “to make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” One writer at Vox wrote, in response, that it was a transparent "invitation to discrimination." Even by Trump’s standards, these ideas were extreme—but Espinoza and the Remembrance Project have been championing them for years. She still wanted the President to do more, according to her e-mail. “Our ‘accomplishment’ will be reached when the Trump Administration . . . is actively assisting our . . . families with: burial, medical and counseling as well as to provide guidance through the legal system to prevent activist judges and prosecutors from giving more consideration to the criminal illegal alien than the victimized citizen(s).”

Espinoza, who is in her early fifties, describes herself as both a “fifth-generation Texan” and “the child of an immigrant father.” He came to the U.S. from Mexico in the nineteen-fifties—“the right way,” she told BuzzFeed, in 2015. “I never saw a Mexican flag anywhere—not in our home, you know? It was just America and the Bible.” Her awareness of social injustice, she told the Web site, began when she was living in Houston, in the nineteen-nineties, divorced and raising her daughter as a single parent. “I saw things taking place in the country that I just felt weren’t right,” she said. One relative, a veteran of the Second World War, had his pension cut while “there were people illegally in the country who got everything free.” But it wasn’t until 2009 that Espinoza finally decided to act. She’d followed the news about several policemen in Houston who’d been killed by people who, it was later revealed, had been in the country illegally. That year, Espinoza co-founded the Remembrance Project. “I don’t consider anyone left or right,” she said. “Just for our families or against our families.”

Some eighty families in twenty-eight states are affiliated with the Remembrance Project. The group offers “stolen-lives families,”as Espinoza calls them, a platform to express their grief publicly. (In this way, the Remembrance Project is more of a network than a formal organization.) In 2012, Espinoza toured the country with a giant banner she called the “Stolen Lives Quilt,” which bears the photographs of victims. The quilt, which she’s trademarked, became a symbol of the cause. From the beginning, Espinoza has claimed that her agenda is strictly to remember and honor victims and their families; she smarts from being portrayed as some nativist fearmonger. But her group’s rhetoric goes much further.

“Pro-amnesty special interests have spent millions on spreading the lie that the legalization of undocumented aliens is somehow good for America and American families,” the Remembrance Project’s Web site declares. “We need your help in combating the lies of these deceptive open-border operatives.” Sentiments like these have put Espinoza in questionable company over the years. She’s accepted money from a group founded by a known white nationalist named John Tanton, and she has appeared on the cover of his journal, The Social Contract. Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me, “While Maria Espinoza and her organization highlight the stories of the victims of undocumented immigrants, she uses these to advance a nativist agenda. Espinoza has also clearly demonstrated that she is comfortable working with extreme elements of the anti-immigrant movement, including with white nationalists and hate groups.”

Many anti-immigrant groups recognized the power that Espinoza brought to their cause. Activists believe that undocumented immigrants are a threat to public safety. Even though numerous studies have shown a strong correlation between the presence of immigrants in a community and a reduction in crime, the Remembrance Project provided powerful and tragic narratives that anti-immigrant activists could use to make their case, and Espinoza’s group soon took on an importance out of proportion to its relatively small size. As one leading anti-immigrant strategist wrote in the National Review, “It is unbelievable to see that so many innocent Americans have been killed by undocumented immigrant felons in recent years.” The Remembrance Project, he added, was “the only forum” for people “to tell their stories of Americans killed because of lax immigration policies.”

By 2013, Espinoza had attracted the attention of Republicans in Washington, who also saw the value of having victims’ families share their stories at crucial moments. Congress was considering comprehensive immigration-reform legislation. One of these Republican was Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, Trump’s pick to be Attorney General, who appeared with Espinoza at an “opposing amnesty” press conference organized by the Tea Party Patriots; another was Steve King, a hardline anti-immigration congressman from Iowa, who organized a town hall with Espinoza. When immigration reform foundered, Espinoza and other far-right groups were emboldened. The following year, Espinoza joined a group of anti-immigrant activists who met with Jeh Johnson, the head of the Department of Homeland Security. The nativist coalition was growing too big for the government to ignore. Espinoza decided to run for Congress, challenging an incumbent in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District last year. She lost decisively in the primary, but the mere fact of her candidacy was a testament to her increasing prominence.

When Trump announced his Presidential campaign, in June, 2015, he seized on rhetoric painting Americans as the innocent victims of rampant immigrant criminality. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke often about “angel mothers”—the mothers of people killed by immigrants—and Espinoza began appearing as a warmup act at some of his rallies. “The Remembrance Project has never had the kind of access to the mainstream that Donald Trump has been giving them,” Lindsay Schubiner, the advocacy director of the Center for New Community, a nonprofit that tracks anti-immigrant groups, told me. In March, Espinoza wrote an open letter to the Republican candidates for President. The letter listed a number of policies that aimed to help victims’ families, and proposed that the necessary funding be raised through a tax on remittances—money that immigrants send back to their countries of origin. Trump was the only candidate in the crowded field to embrace her proposals. “Angel mothers” were even given prime speaking slots at the Republican National Convention.

In September, at the height of the general-election campaign, Trump attended a private luncheon in Houston sponsored by the Remembrance Project. The speeches began with a long disquisition on the ills of sanctuary cities delivered by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and a leading figure in the anti-immigrant movement. “I’m going to say a few words about a problem that is one of the most outrageous and dangerous problems we have in America today, and it’s the problem of sanctuary cities,” he began. He gave a history of the sanctuary-city movement (“we’ve been living under sanctuary cities for nearly four decades”), along with a primer on the broader context of what was at issue (“it’s not just about crime; it’s also about terrorism”). He then gave way to Espinoza, who introduced Trump as the only candidate “who reached out to our families, our stolen-lives families, America’s most forgotten families.” Four months later, the two of them would be together in the Oval Office, with Trump grinning broadly as Espinoza beamed.