President Donald Trump met with parents of children on Wednesday who were killed by MS-13 gang members, promising to continue deporting illegal immigrant gangs and secure the Southern border.

One father praised the president for describing the gang members as “animals” despite the controversy that followed.

“I think you used the correct word. Animals. That they are,” said Freddy Cuevas, the father of a girl murdered by MS-13 said. “They took her away from us and destroyed her dream.”

Both the girls, Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens, were killed in September 2016, by MS-13 gang members beating them to death with baseball bats and machetes.

Robert Mickens, another father who lost his daughter thanked Trump for continuing to fight gangs of illegal immigrants.

“This is a fight, in my opinion, that should have been happening a long time ago, I don’t know why it hasn’t, but thank you for doing what you’re doing right now,” he said.

Mickens said that he was alarmed by children in gangs killing other children, especially in school.

“Our streets should not have to be bloodshed,” he said. “Us as parents should not have to bury our child.”

Mickens criticized protestors of the president’s agenda,

“They’re not seeing the bigger picture because they’re not living the life that we have to go through every day,” he said, recalling the feelings of his lost daughter.

He admitted that it was a “touchy subject” to talk about immigration in New York.

“They have to realize America is based off of immigration. Everybody who came here as an immigrant wanted the American dream,” Mickens said. “The American dream is still there but if you’re going to come here with acts of violence, you can stay in your country with that because we don’t need it here anymore.”

Trump promised that the fight would continue, despite criticism from the establishment media and Democrats about his use of the term “animal” to describe gang members.

“Nobody understood it, nobody, when they started rationalizing, maybe it was the way they grew up … but we’re stuck with a big problem,” he said.