An undocumented immigrant was arrested for allegedly killing a college student. Now Latinos are facing harassment and threats.

In two recent and separate murder cases — one in Georgia, one in Pennsylvania — a man allegedly killed a woman he did not know for reasons yet to be disclosed. One of the women was a nursing student at Augusta University. The other was an Amish wife and mother expecting her third child. Both were white and in their early 20s. But only the killing of Laken Riley, who was fatally attacked while jogging at the University of Georgia campus on Feb. 22, has fueled Republican posturing and racist animus.

After Georgia authorities announced that the man suspected of killing Riley, Jose Ibarra, is an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant, most could predict what would come next — xenophobic harassment and threats against Latinos. Georgia’s House Republicans even quickly passed a bill that would require police and sheriff ’s departments to arrest and detain anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. It has now moved to the Georgia state Senate.

Republican Representative Mike Collins of Georgia introduced a similar bill, the Laken Riley Act, in the GOP-led US House last week, which would require federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with theft. Collins blames Riley’s killing on what he calls the Biden administration’s “open-borders policies.”

There’s been no comparable wave of threats or proposed legislation targeting white people in the rural Pennsylvania county where Rebekah A. Byler was killed in her home on Feb. 26. That’s probably because the suspect, Shawn Cranston, is a white man.

That’s white privilege at work. When a white person commits a crime, it’s solely about the accused. I doubt that most white people feel a sense of panic when a suspect in a horrific crime is also white because that suspect’s race never becomes a referendum on the innate criminality of an entire race. Bills aren’t debated in legislatures on whether police should be obligated to stop them because their whiteness makes them suspicious.

But when the suspect is a person of color, those who share nothing more with the accused than perhaps culture, religion, or skin color are usually treated as proxy suspects.

In a statement, UGA’s Hispanic Student Association and LISTo, a mentoring program for Latino freshmen and transfer students, said, “The hurtful and discriminatory comments made following the tragic loss of one of our own [Riley was a former UGA student] have deeply shaken us all. Such grief should not be made use of for racism, hatred, or xenophobia.”

Two Latino UGA students who agreed to be interviewed on CNN’s “First of All” on Saturday changed their minds after they said they received death threats. “This is how real the fear is,” said Victor Blackwell, the show’s host. One unidentified student told Blackwell, “I love UGA, it’s a great school. But right now, it sucks to be a Latino student here.”

At a raucous press conference, Mayor Kelly Girtz of Athens-Clarke County, where Riley was killed, tried to address the mounting racial tensions. A woman held up a sign with the words, “Blood on Your Hands.” A man repeatedly screamed, “You’re fired,” and no one needs to think too hard about where he got that phrase.

Without using Donald Trump’s name, Girtz mentioned how the former president spoke “in the most vile terms about people who were foreign-born.” When he referred to Charlottesville, Va. — the site of the deadly 2017 hate march where a white supremacist murdered antiracist protester Heather Heyer — the audience became increasingly unruly, with one man yelling, “This is an invasion,” a rightwing pejorative about migrants seeking to cross the nation’s southern border.

That anonymous yeller must have missed the part about how the crisis has been exacerbated by Republicans who scuttled a bipartisan border security bill last month to appease Trump, who didn’t want Biden to score a big election season win.

Despite GOP declarations to the contrary, several studies have found that undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely to commit crimes as nativeborn or legal American citizens. But on the first day of his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump infamously excoriated Mexican migrants as “rapists” and people who were “bringing crime” into this country.

That’s the image foisted on all Black and brown immigrants regardless of status, one that has become a favorite rightwing tool to stoke white fears of not only crime but also replacement.

With all this racist fist-shaking, one aspect of these killings hasn’t garnered many headlines — the daily horror of violence against women. What happened to Riley, Byler, and too many women every year is a damning reminder that there is no place where a woman can feel truly safe — not out for a morning jog in a familiar area nor within the confines of their own home.

But Republicans don’t care about protecting women. In the party of Trump, it’s racism that always sells.

When the suspect is a person of color, those who share nothing more with the accused than perhaps culture, religion, or skin color are usually treated as proxy suspects.