Victim’s family protests efforts to politicize her killing
The arrest of an undocumented immigrant in the slaying of Mollie Tibbetts has thrust the tragic case into the middle of a contentious debate on immigration and border security, with President Donald Trump’s White House seizing on her death — against some of her family’s wishes — to bolster its own agenda.
The White House on its official Twitter account Wednesday released an emotional video that features several family members of victims of violence committed by undocumented immigrants.
“For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first degree murder led police to the cornfield where her body was found. The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone,” the video’s caption reads.
Since launching his bid for the presidency, Trump has made immigration crackdown a cornerstone of his platform while often times sparking backlash for invoking racist stereotypes and linking immigrants to crime. The day he declared his White House run in 2015, he dubbed Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, and has doubled down those comments in the years since.
The president similarly seized on the 2015 murder of Kate Steinle, a California woman who was gunned down by an immigrant in San Francisco, throughout the campaign. He’s also featured the families of similar victims at high-profile events, including the 2016 Republican National Convention and his first joint address to Congress.
But several members of the Tibbetts family have rejected being used as a political rallying point and have pushed back against the anti-immigrant narrative.
“Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color,” her aunt Billie Jo Calderwood wrote on Facebook. “Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.”
Tibbetts’ cousin sparred with conservative activist Candace Owens on Twitter, slamming her for putting a political spin on her family’s tragedy.
“hey i’m a member of mollie’s family and we are not so f---ing small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals,” she wrote directly to Owens. “now stop being a f---ing snake and using my cousins death as political propaganda.”
Christian Bahena Rivera was arrested and charged with first-degree murder earlier this week in the death of Tibbetts, whose July disappearance sparked a massive search effort and dominated headlines nationwide. He led investigators early Tuesday to a body believed to be Tibbetts in a cornfield about 12 miles outside of Brooklyn, Iowa — where the college student was last spotted out for an evening run.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified the 24-year-old suspect as undocumented and said he’d been living in the country for the last four to seven years. Rivera’s employer, Yarrabee Farms, said it was unaware he was undocumented and that he provided them with a different name at his time of hire.