Trump lies and exploits Ruby Garcia’s death
“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals, they’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals.’ ”
That was Trump in Grand Rapids, Mich., talking about immigrants. His speech made headlines not for that mouthful of racist barf but for a lie he told onstage: that he had spoken with the family of Ruby Garcia.
Mavi Garcia, her little sister, told news outlets that was untrue. It was a vulgar move for Trump to lie about speaking to a victim’s immediate family, but his dehumanization of immigrants as violent predators is more disturbing.
I’ll explain why. But first, the truth about Ruby Garcia.
On March 22, Garcia was in the passenger seat of her red Mazda. Her boyfriend, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, was driving when they had an argument.
Ortiz-Vite allegedly pulled out an illegally purchased 9-millimeter pistol and shot Garcia multiple times in the head, according to court records. Before dragging Garcia out of the car and leaving her on the side of the freeway, he told authorities, he shot her again, because he thought she was still alive.
While it’s true that OrtizVite is in the country illegally, his situation isn’t quite as Trump implied. Ortiz-Vite was a “Dreamer,” brought across the border as a child and granted access to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He apparently eventually lost that status and was deported after multiple arrests for nonviolent crimes. He returned to the city he grew up in after sneaking across the border.
After Garcia’s killing, Ortiz-Vite somehow ended up at a church 40 miles away, where the pastor allowed him to spend the night. The next day, she invited him to the Palm Sunday service. Somewhere in the middle of the sermon, Ortiz-Vite went to the bathroom, called 911 and confessed. Police arrested him outside the church.
What Ortiz-Vite has allegedly admitted to is a brutal cruelty that will haunt Garcia’s family forever. There is nothing in what I am saying that offers an excuse for his actions. But Ortiz-Vite is not a stand-in for all immigrants, and so far we have no reason to believe that his immigration status drove his actions.
Sisters and brothers, this is not a crisis of hordes at the border. It is a crisis of violent men — one that we do not take seriously, even though it is deadly serious.
More than 100 women were killed in domestic violence incidents in Michigan in 2022. And a weird statistic to collect, but one that shows even the nonfatal attacks are ugly: 57 victims had their teeth knocked out.
Three women die in domestic violence incidents in the United States every day; intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime — let that sink in.
And then there’s the illegal gun. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the chances of a homicide by 500%. But I don’t hear Trump screaming about gun control.
And here’s the ultimate truth about Garcia: Ruby’s love for plants and traveling came nothing close to her affectionate smile that illuminated the room or contagious laughter.
That’s from her obituary. Ruby was laid to rest on March 29. May her god protect her, because we didn’t.
Michigan is, as you know, a battleground state. In 2020, Joe Biden won it by only 154,000 votes. So every vote counts. But not every murder does.
With a quick check of the news, I found a Michigander in jail after his wife turned up dead; five Wolverines charged with keeping a woman chained to a pole in a basement for a month before killing her; and another man just convicted of killing a teenager, then killing his girlfriend to keep her quiet.
Out of the many recent fatal atrocities in Michigan, only Garcia’s fits Trump’s political agenda. It embodies the fear that “hordes” of immigrants are a threat to “true” Americans, especially women.
And it also plays off the conspiracy that there is an elite force (Democrats, lizard people, Hollywood, Biden, all of the above) bringing those vicious immigrants into the United States so they can illegally vote in between committing violent crimes.
Trump’s exploitation of Garcia’s death isn’t exactly new — just a refinement of a tactic he used in his 2016 campaign with the killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco.
Steinle was shot by a Mexican man who was in the U.S. illegally, who minutes prior had found the stolen gun of a Bureau of Land Management officer. He accidentally discharged it when he picked it up, and the single bullet hit Steinle in the back.
Trump used the case to bash sanctuary cities and call for the building of his big, beautiful wall, but he hadn’t quite honed his message of terror.
Now, along with Garcia‘s slaying, he has been stumping on the tragic killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was allegedly killed by a Venezuelan man in the country illegally in what authorities are describing as a crime of opportunity.
Trump actually did meet with Riley’s family. But as with Garcia’s family, Riley’s parents want her remembered for the smart, kind, beautiful woman she was. Not politics.
“It makes me angry,” her father told NBC News. “She should be raised up for the person that she is.”
But with another tight race entering its last months, Trump needs more than just hordes. Even illegally voting hordes.
With Ruby Garcia and Laken Riley, he inflames the urgency of an already volatile issue by adding a triedand-true anxiety: They are not just coming — they are coming for the women!