Her Name Was Nilufar Easmin.
Trump posted her murder. He never said her name.
Her name, according to the Bangladeshi press outlets that bothered to cover her murder, was Nilufar Easmin.
She had come to this country from Gorarbag village, in the Kushakhali Union of Lakshmipur District, in southeastern Bangladesh — a place most Americans couldn’t find on a map even if the fate of the republic depended on it. She had two daughters. She had been working the register at the D&D Convenience Store, a Bangladeshi-owned shop bolted to a Chevron station on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly three months.
On the morning of April 2, she heard her car being vandalized in the parking lot. She walked outside to find out why.
She was beaten to death with a hammer.
That is the whole of what we know for certain about the last minutes of Nilufar Easmin’s life. Everything else — her exact age, conflicting in various accounts as 42, 48, or 51; the full arc of how she came to Florida; what she wanted for those two daughters — remains unresolved in the public record, a void that will take time and care and reporting to fill.
What we know with equal certainty is what happened next: the President of the United States turned her death into content.
DONALD TRUMP — a man convicted of 34 felony counts, currently in political freefall, his name reportedly appearing thousands of times in the Jeffrey Epstein files — posted graphic surveillance footage of Easmin’s murder, amplifying a video package assembled and branded by his own Department of Homeland Security. The footage shows the suspect, 40-year-old Rolbert Joachin, a Haitian national, striking her in the head with a hammer, knocking her to the ground, and continuing to beat her as she lay there.
DHS and its conservative media partners have packaged this killing as proof that Biden’s immigration policies are responsible for Easmin’s death. Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said the suspect “barbarically hit this woman in the head multiple times with a hammer,” adding that “their reckless immigration policies cost this woman her life.”
Never mind that Easmin herself was an immigrant.
Never mind that the Bangladeshi community in Fort Myers — the community that employed her, that is laying flowers at the gas station where she died — is also a community of immigrants, of mothers and fathers and cashiers and store managers who came to this country and are now watching the president weaponize their grief.
THE TIMING tells you everything about why Trump reached for this video now.
His presidency is in historic collapse. The Iran war — prosecuted with the hapless Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon — has become a signature debacle. The mass deportation campaign, the crown jewel of his coalition’s fever dreams, has failed so thoroughly that the American public has swung back toward immigrants with a warmth not seen in years, and ICE — once the cudgel of choice — has become politically toxic.
And then, this morning, First Lady Melania Trump held a press conference at the White House and all but announced that she is not her husband’s keeper.
A president desperate to change the subject will reach for anything. Today, he reached for Nilufar Easmin.
Easmin’s co-workers told Bangladeshi press that two days before her death, the man who would kill her had come into the store and failed to withdraw money from the ATM. He told her the machine had taken his money. She told him the ATM belonged to a bank — not the store — and that she couldn’t give him cash. He left. He came back April 2. He smashed her windshield. She went outside. He killed her.
Mohammad Shipu, the store’s manager, told Bangladeshi media she had only been there three months.
Fort Myers police launched a manhunt — K-9 units, Lee County Sheriff’s aviation — and placed three nearby schools on lockdown. Joachin was arrested later that day near Mango and Raleigh Streets. He has pleaded not guilty. At a court appearance, detectives said he admitted returning to the gas station specifically to kill her, and that he wore the same clothes so she would recognize him.
He is being held without bond.
UPDATE: The Bangladesh Association of Southwest Florida has created a GoFundMe to support Easmin’s two daughters. You can contribute here.
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