President Trump used the death of Mollie Tibbetts on Wednesday to call for a change in immigration laws and justify his separation of illegal immigrants from their children at the border. Trump tweeted a video message about Tibbetts — who was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant in Brooklyn, Iowa — just one day after two of his close associates were convicted of federal crimes. “Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family,” Trump said in a reference to his administration’s family separation policy. “A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her.” The murder suspect, Cristhian Rivera, worked at a farm owned by a prominent Iowa GOP family. The owners claim Rivera passed the E-verify system check. “We have tremendous crime trying to come through the borders,” Trump added. “Nobody has laws like the United States — they are strictly pathetic.” Rivera’s lawyer claims the man is not here illegally — but has not provided proof. Trump called for Republicans to change the immigration laws because the “Democrats will never do it.”<doc-sep>Speaking at an Ohio Republican State Party fundraiser in Columbus Friday evening, President Donald Trump invoked the death of Mollie Tibbetts to slam Democrats on immigration. Shortly after saying the Republican party “stands strongly behind ICE,” Trump then brought up how “they charged an illegal alien in the murder of a college student Mollie Tibbetts. “Everybody loved her. Everybody that met her loved her,” Trump said. “And the father was saying she’s coming back, she’s coming back… This went on for a long time. When they found out that it was this horrible, illegal immigrant that viciously killed her, all of a sudden that story went down. They didn’t want to cover it the way it should have been covered. But what happened to Mollie was a disgrace.” He added “Our hearts go out. We mourn for Mollie’s family.” Tibbetts family has said publicly they do not want her death politicized. Yet, Trump did not stop at Tibbetts’ tragedy to make his point. He then mentioned the death of an elderly homeless woman in New York City who was allegedly beaten to death by an undocumented immigrant who Trump said “was not supposed to be in this country” and a rape of a young child in the “sanctuary city” of Philadelphia also allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant. “Democrat immigration policies are destroying innocent lives and spilling very innocent blood,” he concluded. “We believe that any party that puts criminal aliens before American citizens should be voted out of office, not into office.” The audience applauded. Watch above, via C-SPAN. [image via screengrab] Have a tip we should know? [email protected]<doc-sep>There are currently two Americas: the America that cares about the prosecution of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, and the America that cares about the prosecution of Cristhian Bahena Rivera, arrested Tuesday in the murder of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts. This is, of course, exactly how President Trump wants it. Trump has eagerly adopted Tibbetts’s death as the latest argument for his immigration crackdown — wall and all — because authorities believe Rivera is an unauthorized immigrant. To Trump’s critics, it seems crass at best, and opportunistic at worst. After all, the same evening that Rivera was arrested, Trump’s former campaign manager had been convicted on eight counts, and his former personal lawyer and “fixer” had implicated the president himself in a violation of federal campaign finance law. To focus instead on Tibbetts had a whiff of desperation about it, from a president who’s often been accused of trying to distract the press from bad news by feeding the base red meat. But it’s wrong to think of Trump’s use of Mollie Tibbetts only in terms of his anxiety over his associates’ legal troubles, to see it as a cheap distraction from the “real story” of the Trump presidency. The central motif of Donald Trump’s political career since he launched a long-shot run for president is this: He has mobilized people to support him (and his immigration agenda) by preying on their fear that an unauthorized immigrant will kill their children. It’s an incredibly powerful and very real fear — one that is immune to facts and figures about low immigrant criminality and rejects any question of policy trade-offs. And stoking it has worked so well for so long. Donald Trump’s career as a politician has been built around the fear that an unauthorized immigrant will kill your child It is difficult to overstate just how much cases like Tibbetts’s — or, really, the fear of cases like Tibbetts’s — took Trump from vanity candidate in a crowded 2016 GOP field to Republican nominee and ultimately president of the United States. The launch of his presidential campaign in June 2015 was treated as a curiosity until he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. The press coverage he got for those comments (which he gleefully ate up) gave him an early boost in the polls and, crucially, a new set of allies: “Angel Families,” people who’d become politically mobilized (and associated with anti-immigrant groups) after their relatives were killed by unauthorized immigrants. Trump’s first major rally featured not only former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (an infamously hardline immigration hawk whom Trump pardoned in 2017) but an Angel Parent. A group of Angel Families took the stage at the 2016 Republican National Convention. This very specific strain of immigration hawkery — the fear of murder by an immigrant — is the reason Trump had a constituency in the early, freewheeling days of his campaign. It isn’t merely one of the many obsessions of a president whose personality drives his White House; it is where his rapport with his culture-warrior “base” aligns with the substance of the policies he has pursued in office. It is a strategic linchpin. When the White House worries it’s losing an immigration argument, it goes back to the murder specter. When Trump faced a potential government shutdown in January over a legislative fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Trump administration put out an ad saying that Democrats would be “complicit” in any murders committed by unauthorized immigrants during the shutdown. When the Trump administration’s policy of family separation at the US-Mexico border was dominating the headlines in late June, the White House convened a gathering of relatives who had been “permanently separated” from their families. But it’s not just a defensive tactic. Memorializing victims of immigrant crime is a staple of Trump’s formal, scripted speeches. Trump has already made it clear that he intends to make the murder of white women by unauthorized immigrants a campaign issue not just in the 2018 midterms but in the 2020 presidential election. He said as much in November 2017, when Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who killed Kate Steinle in San Francisco in 2015, was acquitted of murder and involuntary manslaughter. Trump had used Steinle’s murder in the same way he is now using Tibbetts’s — even more pointedly, as Garcia Zarate had been released from jail in the “sanctuary city” of San Francisco before killing Steinle. The jury was not told the killer of Kate was a 7 time felon. The Schumer/Pelosi Democrats are so weak on Crime that they will pay a big price in the 2018 and 2020 Elections. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2017 Murders like Tibbetts’s tap into an irrational but all-consuming fear Tibbetts’s disappearance was already a national news story. The story’s denouement — the arrest of an unauthorized immigrant who was a stranger to Tibbetts — just happened to align perfectly with tropes Trump has been using for years. (They align so perfectly, in fact, that I’ve already seen some liberals assume that the whole thing was a setup to scapegoat unauthorized immigrants and help Trump.) Part of this is because Tibbetts, like Kate Steinle, was a young white woman. But in large part, it’s because the inexplicability of Tibbetts’s disappearance — and the fact that a stranger was ultimately arrested for her murder — tapped into the powerful fear that something like this could happen to anyone. Murder by a stranger may be the rarest type of murder, but it inspires the most public terror, because there’s no way to rebut the idea that it could happen to anyone. It almost certainly won’t — the odds are vanishingly low — but it could. This is what is soooo wrong. Just some “Girl In Iowa.” Could be be just “your daughter, your sister, or your friend.” A murder at the hands of an ILLEGAL?!?! Trying to process. There needs to be immigration reform ASAP. Enough. https://t.co/qFBAuLbCZY — Karin Housley (@KarinHousley) August 22, 2018 In a July survey, 53 percent of Trump voters said that the MS-13 gang posed a very or somewhat serious threat to their communities. Fifty-one percent said they were very or somewhat worried that they or a family member would become a victim of MS-13 violence. Rationally, this fear is massively disproportionate — there are only a few thousand MS-13 members in the US, and their targets are almost always their peers in Central American immigrant communities. But fewer than half of these concerned Trump voters actually erroneously thought that MS-13 was actually the largest gang in the US. It’s not simply about people miscalculating the risk, but about the outsize fear that remote risks play. Trump and other conservative politicians are using the immigrant murder specter to political ends; that doesn’t make the fear they’re inspiring any less genuinely felt (and it doesn’t mean that the politicians themselves aren’t genuinely worried). Their line of thinking turns security into a binary condition: You’re either perfectly safe or you’re not. And if you’re not safe, anything that can make you feel safe is a step in the right direction. Policy is justified not on the effects it has, but on the feelings it inspires in the people whose fears are being catered to. But only some people get to make decisions based on remote fears: people who generally live in low-crime communities where murder is something that happens only on the news. And Donald Trump is only listening to some fears — the fears of white people who see people who aren’t “like them” as generally suspicious to begin with. In practice, this means that the fears of certain white people justify a crackdown on other people (who generally aren’t white). It means that concern about an unfamiliar face in the neighborhood is a valid reason to call police. It makes immigration policy — a complicated civil/criminal system — into a simple expression of values in the name of feelings.<doc-sep>
Mollie Tibbetts (left) and Cristhian Rivera (right). Rivera was charged Aug. 22, 2018 with first-degree murder in the disappearance of Tibbetts, according to arrest documents from the Poweshiek County Sheriff's Office. US President Donald Trump speaks during the Ohio Republican Party State Dinner at the Greater Columbus Convention Center August 24, 2018 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images) (CNN) — President Donald Trump on Friday tied the death of 20-year-old Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts to Democratic policies, continuing the administration’s politicization of crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. “Democrat immigration policies are destroying innocent lives and spilling very innocent blood,” Trump said in while speaking in Ohio. “We believe that any party that puts criminal aliens before American citizens should be out of office, not into office.” The President’s remarks on Tibbetts come not long after the White House added the slain University of Iowa student to a list of individuals who were killed by undocumented immigrants, according to police. Trump was also seen in a video released on his Twitter account speaking about Tibbetts’ death on Thursday. Tibbetts, whose body was found on Tuesday, went missing while she was on an evening run in July. A preliminary report from the autopsy determined her cause of death was “multiple sharp force injuries,” according to the Iowa State Medical Examiner. Twenty-four-year-old Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a Mexican who came to the United States illegally, was charged in Tibbetts’ death on Wednesday after he said he had followed her while she was on her run. After the news of her death, the White House began to use the case as a talking point for revising immigration law – which Trump continued on Friday, signaling his addition of her death to his midterm stump speech. “Just this week we learned that Iowa authorities … they charged an illegal alien in the murder of a college student – Mollie Tibbetts,” the President said. He later continued, criticizing the media, “When they found out that it was this horrible, illegal immigrant that viciously killed her, all of a sudden that story went down. They didn’t want to cover it the way it should have been covered. But what happened to Mollie was a disgrace, and our hearts go out.” Trump also tied the death of a woman and the rape of a child to Democratic immigration policies since both acts were allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. “In recent weeks an elderly homeless woman was allegedly beaten to death by a twice-deported illegal alien that was not supposed to be in this country,” he said. “In the sanctuary city of Philadelphia, I went to school in Philadelphia, local officials released a previously deported illegal alien back onto the streets after his release. The illegal alien raped a very young child. I won’t even tell you how old this child was.” The Trump administration has repeatedly seized on crimes committed by undocumented immigrants as a way to push hardline immigration policies. In December 2017, after a jury acquitted the man who had been charged with killing Kate Steinle, Trump tweeted about the verdict, calling it “disgraceful” and “a complete travesty of justice.” Steinle’s death was often referenced by Trump on the campaign trail as a warning against sanctuary cities. The man acquitted in her death had been deported five times before the shooting. CNN’s Eric Levenson contributed to this report.