Killing of Iowa woman inflames immigration debate
BROOKLYN, Iowa — Television cameras had for weeks swarmed this small town in Iowa farm country as the police looked for Mollie Tibbetts, the college student who went for a jog last month and never returned home.
After hundreds of tips and interviews, and after countless prayer vigils and donations to a reward fund, investigators got a tragic break in their case Tuesday. A body believed to be Tibbetts’ was found buried beneath cornstalks on a farm outside town. Authorities charged Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who they said is an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico, with first-degree murder in her death.
President Donald Trump and other conservatives quickly cited the arrest of Rivera, who worked on a farm owned by a prominent Republican family, as proof of the flawed immigration system and lax border security the president has long warned about.
Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, released a statement saying she was “angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community.” And the White House Twitter account posted a video with the emotional accounts of people whose family members had been killed by immigrants who entered the country illegally.
“Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family,” Trump said Wednesday evening in a Twitter message, a clear reference to his much-criticized policy that tried to deter illegal border crossings by separating migrant families.
“A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her. We need the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, we need our border laws changed, we need Republicans to do it because the Democrats aren’t going to do it,” he said.
Rivera’s lawyer, Allan Richards, disputed the government’s claims that his client was in the country illegally and said Trump’s comments highlighting his immigration status could prejudice future jurors. Richards said his client, who was ordered held on $5 million cash bond during a brief court appearance Wednesday, came to the U.S. at 17, had the equivalent of a middle school education and had worked for years tending to dairy cows.
“For sad and sorry Trump to say that they’re illegal without even giving them a hearing is totally wrong,” Richards said in an interview after the court hearing.
Rivera’s arrest was a lead story for much of Tuesday evening and Wednesday on several conservative-leaning news websites, and was touted as a boost to the Trump administration’s argument for a more hard-line stance on immigration.
Trump is expected to continue to push immigration as a signature issue in courting voters ahead of November’s midterm elections. In Iowa, Republicans are defending two congressional seats that Democrats have high hopes of winning, and Reynolds is seeking a full term as governor.
The discovery of Tibbetts’ body devastated her hometown, Brooklyn, where she had returned for the summer after studying psychology at the University of Iowa. After weeks of anxiously awaiting news, some residents said Wednesday they were frustrated to learn that the suspect in her death was in the country illegally.
“Mollie would still be alive today if we would just enforce the laws we already have in place,” said Kerry Traver, 73, who lives in nearby Marengo. “Here illegally and nobody’s doing anything about it.”
Rusty Clayton, owner of True Value Hardware in Brooklyn, said customers in the small town — where doors are seldom locked — have come in to have house keys made ever since news broke that Tibbetts was missing. But he said the town views its Hispanic residents not as outsiders, but as members of the community.
“Their kids go to our school,” Clayton said. “One was homecoming king, and another of the students has been valedictorian of the class. The kids here well respect them and interact with them.”
Immigration has long been a divisive issue in Iowa, where farmers depend on foreign-born laborers to tend their crops and livestock, but where an influx of Hispanic residents has exposed tensions in some cities. While Iowa politicians from both major parties offered condolences to the Tibbetts family, Republicans were more likely to note Rivera’s immigration status in their statements.
Rivera’s arrest also raised questions about the process companies use to check whether job applicants are allowed to work in the United States. Rivera’s employer, Yarrabee Farms, said initially that the federal government had cleared Rivera for work through its well-known E-Verify system. But on Wednesday evening, Yarrabee corrected itself and said he had been checked through a different Social Security Administration database.
Both systems are vulnerable to fraud when applicants present valid documents that belong to someone else, experts said.