A Canadian woman living in Los Angeles on a temporary U.S. visa spent the weekend of September, watching her job, her online following, and her ability to stay in the country collapse after a handful of posts about Charlie Kirk and the American flag went viral.
Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA and a prominent conservative activist, was assassinated on September 10, 2025, while speaking at an outdoor campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
He was struck in the neck by a single shot from a rooftop roughly 130 to 140 meters away. Tyler James Robinson, then 22, was later charged in the killing.
During the first anniversary of that shooting fell on a Wednesday in 2026. That is the window in which Sabrina Messa, who posts as @SabrinaMessa95 and describes herself as a "Proud Canadian" temporarily in the U.S., published the content that drew the storm.
Read: The Killing Of Iryna Zarutska, And Later, Charlie Kirk: Dividing America Over The Internet
Messa is from the Toronto area and was living in Los Angeles.
She later said she was not on a student visa, but she has not publicly named the exact visa category or her employer. What is documented is her own account of what happened next.
On September 11, she posted that she had just been fired "with cause" and asked people to leave her alone.
The following day she wrote that she had posted memes about Charlie Kirk that were "insensitive and disrespectful to his family," that she had uploaded personal photos of herself, her sister, and her sister's friends standing on the U.S. flag, and that she accepted responsibility.
In another post she said she had received "a notice for expulsion from the US because of my previous flag photos," that she would not deny it, and that she and her sister planned to leave Monday morning.
Those admissions matter because they are the strongest primary evidence available.
Independent news outlets have not published a U.S. government Department of State/Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statement that names Messa the way the department named six other foreign nationals in October 2025, when it announced visa revocations for people from Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, and Paraguay who had celebrated Kirk's killing online.
In that earlier wave the department wrote that the U.S. "has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans."
Messa's case sits in the same political climate a year later, but the removal order itself is something she reported, not something a government agency has confirmed in a public release.
Some observers also noted she claimed, then deleted, a post saying her visa had been pulled.
The posts that triggered the backlash, according to her own later explanations and widely circulated screenshots, included anniversary memes about Kirk and photos of feet or people standing on a flag, which she described as having been taken in an elevator.
She later argued that some images circulating with her name were AI-generated or not the U.S. flag at all. She also said stepping on or wiping her feet on the flag "may be in bad taste" but that the reaction had ruined her life.
Critics treated the combination of Kirk mockery and flag photos as celebration of an American's assassination plus contempt for the country that had admitted her.
The response was fast and personal.
Her "fired with cause" post drew tens of thousands of replies. She said she and her sister were doxxed, flooded with calls and messages ranging from insults, criticisms, death threats and rape threats.
Friends with similar views unfollowed her, she wrote, because they did not want to be "caught."
By Sunday night and into Monday morning she was still on the platform, angry, swearing, and accusing people of enjoying the wreckage of her job and her sudden move back to Canada with little time to pack.
The story spread quickly in Spanish-language threads as well, including a widely shared post that framed it as breaking news of an expulsion ordered by DHS.
That framing matches Messa's own claim of a removal notice and the administration’s established policy after Kirk's death.
It overstates what can be independently verified from official channels.
What can be verified is narrower and still stark: a visa holder posted content many Americans read as mockery of a political assassination and disrespect for the flag, lost her job, said the government told her to leave, chose not to contest it, and then watched the internet treat the outcome as a public lesson.
The firing, the apologies, the flag photos she acknowledged, the planned Monday departure, and the volume of harassment she reported are all on the record in her own posts.
As of the early hours of September 14, 2026, she was still posting from the same account, still insisting the punishment had destroyed her life, and still saying she and her sister were leaving.
Ultimately while there is an ambiguity within precisely how the government informed the woman about being stripped of residency.
It's worth noting that Messa has a history of combative anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, and anti-U.S. posts.
