A Senate hearing got tense and quiet after Illinois father Joe Abraham confronted retiring Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., for not acknowledging his daughter, Katie, who was killed by an illegal immigrant drunk driver.

After Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, expressed his condolences to Abraham, the grieving father thanked him and then proceeded to drill into Durbin.

“I appreciate it. I also appreciate Ranking Member Welch and Mr. Padilla for recognizing that. What I don’t understand is why my senator of Illinois, Mr. Durbin, [I] haven’t heard two words from him toward me,” he said, pointing in Durbin’s direction.

“It’s kind of amazing,” Abraham added.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT ACCUSED OF KILLING CHICAGO COLLEGE STUDENT TO FACE COURT AFTER TUBERCULOSIS DELAY

In the suddenly quiet hearing chamber, Cruz said, “I think it is a fair question to ask.” Abraham answered, “Kind of happy he’s calling it quits.”

After the tense exchange, Abraham again called out Durbin, writing, “You had the chance to show basic humanity, to acknowledge Katie’s life and death, as other senators in your own party did. Instead, silence. Not a call, not a statement, not even basic human acknowledgment.”

Abraham stated that “silence in the face of tragedy isn’t neutrality. It’s indifference.”

“You’re retiring, but for many of us, that comes 30 years too late. And whoever you choose to endorse should be rejected just as quickly, because Illinois cannot afford more of the same,” he added, writing, “Illinois families deserve better than leaders who look away when the consequences don’t fit their narrative.”

He also criticized Durbin for supporting sanctuary policies, saying, “My daughter died in a system shaped by policies you continue to defend.”

“You chose sanctuary policies that give special privileges to those here illegally, while law-abiding Illinois citizens like my family are left unprotected,” wrote Abraham. “That’s not compassion. That’s a failure of leadership.”

COLLEGE STUDENT’S ALLEGED MURDER BY ILLEGAL WENT EXACTLY AS DEMS ‘INTENDED,’ HOUSE SPEAKER SAYS

Abraham’s 20-year-old daughter, Katie Abraham, was killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunk-driving incident while standing at a stoplight in the college town of Urbana, Illinois. The federal government’s immigration crackdown in the Chicago area was launched in Katie’s honor. Dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” the effort resulted in more than 4,500 illegal immigrant arrests, according to DHS.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Abraham, a lifelong Illinois resident, described his family as navigating a “dark wilderness” in the wake of Katie’s death.

“We have been in a dark wilderness, wandering, trying to find our new purpose … without Katie, who we thought would be with us the rest of our lives,” he said.

ANGEL PARENTS SLAM ILLINOIS SANCTUARY LAWS AFTER ‘PREVENTABLE’ TRAGEDY IN STUDENT’S DEATH

“She was a beautiful soul,” he added, lamenting, “We thought we’d have our children the rest of our lives.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Addressing other Illinoisans, Abraham warned, “If anything, God forbid, happens to you, your state under this regime will turn its back on you, 100%.”

“That’s what they’ve done with us and Katie,” he said. 

During his first Cabinet meeting since launching the U.S. war on Iran, President Trump spent 10 minutes talking about the price of ceremonial White House pens — which he claimed to have brought down, from $1,000 to $5, by switching to his favored Sharpie brand.

Trump was trying to make the point during the Thursday meeting that he’s a great money saver. He seemed chipper, joking with the other leaders of his administration at the table.

Late Thursday, when asked on “The Five” on Fox News about whether Iranian people have access to basic necessities such as drinking water and food, Trump complimented the looks of Dana Perino, the Fox host who’d asked the question, compared to when he’d met her years before.

“Now I’m not allowed to say this, it’s the end of my political career, but you may be even better looking, OK?” Trump said. “You’re not allowed to say a woman’s beautiful anymore.”

He then talked about Iranian authorities killing protesters, but said he’d been pleased with them more recently because they had given him a “present” by allowing oil ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

Through both discussions, Trump maintained a flippant, casual tone — the same he has maintained since the war began a month ago, and a vast departure from that of past wartime presidents.

For weeks, Trump has batted away criticisms of the war campaign and questions about why it was justified and how long it will last. He has derided reporters for asking questions about tactics and whether he’ll deploy boots on the ground as inappropriate and foolish, and repeatedly met concerns about the human toll of the war by shrugging them off or changing the subject.

Meanwhile, his war has cost the U.S. billions of dollars and depleted its global reserves of critical weapons systems such as Tomahawk missiles, which cost millions of dollars each and are needed to maintain U.S. security around the world, according to the Washington Post.

Entering its fifth week, the war has badly disrupted markets, with U.S. stocks falling Friday as Wall Street approached the end of its fifth straight losing week — the longest such streak in nearly four years — and oil prices rising again.

Markets have fluctuated based on Trump’s changing messages on an end to the war, planned and then postponed strikes on Iran’s power plants, strikes on oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East and Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of global oil usually passes.

Trump has talked in recent days about an impending deal to end the war, but so far it has not materialized, with Iran downplaying the seriousness of the negotiations. Iran instead appeared to be formalizing its hold on the strait, including by creating what amounts to a toll on ships seeking passage through the channel from its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The number of U.S. deaths in the conflict has held steady for days — at 13 — but the war continues to exact a daily, devastating toll in the Middle East. In Iran, thousands of targets continued being hit, with the death toll ticking toward 2,000.

Speaking by video during a Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the United States and Israel of harboring a “clear intent to commit genocide” in Iran, claiming that more than 600 schools had been damaged or demolished and more than 1,000 students and teachers “martyred or wounded.”

The discussion related in part to a Feb. 28 strike on an elementary school in Minab that killed more than 165 people, most of them children, which evidence reportedly suggests was the work of the U.S. and which the U.S. says is under investigation.

Casualties also continued in Gulf nations allied with the U.S., where Iran continues to strike U.S. military installations and other infrastructure, and in Lebanon, which Israel has invaded and bombed relentlessly in its own war with the Iranian-aligned Hezbollah force.

And yet, Trump has bounced between speaking engagements and more formal meetings with an apparent lightness — seeming unbothered by the weight of the conflict and acting as if U.S. victory were already at hand.

“We’ve already won the war. Militarily we’ve totally won the war,” he told “The Five” on Thursday.

After Trump’s exchange with Perino, fellow host Greg Gutfeld began to change the topic, saying, “I’m debating whether to be serious or not serious.”

“Do you think Biden would do this interview? Can you imagine? You think Biden — Sleepy Joe — he would do it?” Trump said.

He called the war a “little bit of a detour” from what he said were his otherwise winning economic policies, and asserted again — without providing evidence — that Iran was on the cusp of having a nuclear weapon and would have used it to cause devastation across the Middle East and to the U.S. if the U.S. hadn’t struck first, including when it bombed Iran’s nuclear sites last summer.

“You can’t let a madman or you can’t let a mad ideology have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.

He repeated his long-pushed lie that he won the 2020 election, and suggested his support among his MAGA base remains at 100%.

An AP-NORC poll this week found that most Americans believe that the U.S. military campaign in Iran has gone too far — including about a quarter of Republicans — and that many are worried about gas prices.

During his Cabinet meeting Thursday, Trump seemed supremely confident, but also aware that the conflict was far from settled.

He said that the U.S. was “extremely — really a lot — ahead of schedule” in its war effort, and that “the Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated.” But he also said that “even now, we don’t know if there are any mines” in the Strait of Hormuz, despite the U.S. having wiped out Iran’s “mine droppers,” and acknowledged that “if you think there may be a mine, that’s a bad thought and it stops things up.”

He said the U.S. has “decimated” about 99% of Iranian capabilities, but “the problem with the strait” is that the remaining 1% threat “is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost $1 billion.”

“If we do a 99% decimation, that’s no good,” he said.

During “The Five” interview, Trump was also asked if the CIA had told him that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — who took on the Iranian leadership role after his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in initial strikes — is gay, which would be a crime under Iranian law.

“Well they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them. I think a lot of people are saying that. Which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country, you know?” Trump said, in a stunning acknowledgment of a previously rumored intelligence briefing.

new video loaded: Trump’s Signature to Appear on Dollar Bills