As grotesque as always
Greg Sargent has the details and it’s truly awful:
Donald Trump has invented a new criminological category he describes as “Migrant Crime,” and in Michigan on Tuesday, he seized on the horrible murder of a young woman, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant, to underscore the point. Some news accounts covered this by quoting GOP strategists, with one enthusing that this will win over “security moms,” as if Trump is engaging in something like a conventional campaign strategy here.
But Trump’s ugly demagogic rants in Michigan, and others like it, deserve to be treated as a national scandal. The cherry-picking of isolated terrible crimes to smear migrants as a class is not something we would tolerate if it were directed toward other groups. Never mind what Trump is attempting to do politically. His deranged, malicious, hateful public conduct should be seen as the real story here. It should be covered that way.
Trump’s appearance in Michigan has been overshadowed by the news that Trump may have lied about relatives of the victim, 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. At his event, Trump claimed he had spoken to “some of her family,” but her sister flatly denied he or his campaign had contacted them, and blasted Trump for singling out crimes committed by “illegal immigrants.”
That did shape some of the coverage. But it should not require a brave public intervention from a young woman enduring a horrific tragedy to prod the media into registering the appalling way Trump is twisting this murder and other similar crimes to viciously smear undocumented immigrants across the board.
During his rants in Michigan, Trump also discussed the killing of another woman in Georgia by an “illegal alien animal.” He mocked Democrats for describing undocumented immigrants as “human,” declaring, “They’re not human, they’re animals,” while keeping what “they” means vague. Trump insisted other countries are sending “prisoners, murders, drug dealers, mental patients, and terrorists” to our country, claimed migrants have “wrecked our country,” and blamed it all on “Biden’s border bloodbath.”
It was outrageous. And even more outrageous was his cult’s reaction. Gut wrenching.
Sargent runs down the facts of the Garcia killing as far as we know. She was murdered by a Mexican citizen with whom she had some sort of relationship although it’s unclear exactly what it was. The alleged killer, Brandon Ortiz-Vite was originally a DACA recipient who has been in the US since he was a child but his status expired, he was deported to Mexico and then returned at some point.
None of this can be attributed to Biden’s policies so Trump bringing it up is purely a way to demonize immigrants and smear the president. Neither would he have likely been prevented from any of this by Biden’s first term policies.
Sargent continues:
It is true that with any large group of people—undocumented migrants included—one risks seeing a small percentage of them turn to violent crime. But that’s not an argument against Biden’s immigration policies. As has been demonstrated again and again, there is no evidence that migrants are driving any kind of crime wave in the United States.
In covering Trump’s Michigan event, some news accounts dutifully noted that fact. But they tended to treat this as a conventional fact-check of typical political rhetoric, rather than treating his heinous smearing of a large class of people as itself being the story.
Trump’s constant use of the deranged “migrant crime” trope provides the hook for doing just that. The Republican National Committee now has an official website devoted to chronicling “migrant crime” and “illegal alien crime,” listed out by state (in some states no “illegal alien crimes” have yet been documented). The casual use of such terms to smear large classes of immigrants is the official party position.
All this is straight from the authoritarian playbook. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has noted: “The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.”
How about some stand-alone news analysis pieces devoted to that sort of malign confluence of tactics? Why not cover this hateful, dangerous rhetoric as a sign of Trump’s seething contempt for even the most minimal standards of conduct in public service and public life?
He suggests that Democrats should enter this fray as well, perhaps holding events with the Baltimore bridge collapse victims. immigrant essential workers who lost their lives doing heavy work when it it happened. He writes:
Democrats could say: This is what immigrants are really doing for our country. They could call on Trump: Stop the hate... The Trump-GOP smearing of immigrants is an absolute scandal. And it should be treated as exactly that.
I happened to be in Baltimore when the accident happened and I will say that the local officials and media (even country radio!) were very focused on those victims and their families. Maybe the national Dems, as they live in the area, have made note. They should. The demonization of immigrants is so over-the-top that Trump’s fascism is no longer theoretical.