At a rally in Duluth, Georgia, during the final days of the Presidential race, Donald Trump screened a video, set to the pulsing minor-key soundtrack to a horror movie, depicting what he portrayed as the nightmare of the Biden-Harris Administration. As the voice of a female news anchor announced, “Gut-wrenching new details in the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley,” words from an article in a New York tabloid were highlighted onscreen: “seriously disfiguring.” Then the voice of a second female news anchor reported that the person allegedly responsible for the “heinous” killing was an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
Riley, a twenty-two-year-old who was sexually assaulted and killed on a jogging trail near the University of Georgia, in Athens, has become a morbid icon of the Trump campaign, and the video was the third reminder of her death at the Duluth rally. A photograph of her smiling face had already appeared in a video promising that Trump would “liberate” America from a deadly migrant “occupation.” In Trump’s own speech, he had slowed for dramatic effect as he declared that Riley had been “brilliant”—“the best student, the best of everything, most respected person, beautiful person.” The “savage monster” who killed Riley, he then said, was “let in and released into our country by the open-border policy of Kamala Harris.”
Producers at Fox News may have recognized the political potency of Riley’s murder even before the Trump campaign did. Hours after police arrested the suspect, Jose Ibarra, the anchor of Fox’s eleven-o’clock news program invoked the memory of Kate Steinle, a thirty-two-year-old woman killed nine years ago in a freak accident on a San Francisco pier. On July 1, 2015, a dazed man wandering the pier had unintentionally set off a revolver that he’d found under a bench, and the bullet had ricochetted into Steinle. These wildly different killings had three things in common. Both victims were native-born white women. Both killers were illegal immigrants. And both deaths occurred while Trump was running for President.
The Fox anchor, Trace Gallagher, asked his on-air guests whether Riley was “the biggest case that you’ve heard of since the Kate Steinle case” and suggested that the Georgia killing could be “a game-changer.” Immediately after Steinle’s death, Gallagher reminded the audience, Trump had tweeted about building a border wall and started “a movement.” (Steinle’s mother, Liz Sullivan, later told the San Francisco Chronicle that her family had felt exploited: “For Donald Trump, we were just what he needed—beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a million times.” A tragic accident became “the perfect storm for that man.”)
The 2024 Trump campaign and its allies have seized on Riley’s death even more intensely than his 2020 campaign fastened on Steinle’s—especially in Georgia, a crucial swing state. Two weeks after Riley died, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, interrupted President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address with a demand that he “say her name.” On channels broadcasting the address, a pro-Trump group reportedly funded in part by Elon Musk aired commercials that opened with an image of a ponytailed young woman jogging in slow motion and closed with a montage of thuggish-looking photographs of the murder suspect. “How many more killers has Biden set free?” a voice-over asked. Shortly before Biden visited Atlanta, in March, Representative Mike Collins, a Republican whose district includes Athens, put up billboards about the murder, including one that displayed photographs of Riley and Ibarra alongside the message “Biden put him first, not her.” In Washington, House Republicans passed the Laken Riley Act. The bill, which had no chance of passing the Senate, would have enabled states to sue the federal government for failing to stop migrants from crossing the border.
By the summer, Trump and backers had made Riley’s name the foremost in a litany of three victims, along with Rachel Morin, a thirty-seven-year-old mother who was killed in Maryland in 2023 by an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, and Jocelyn Nungaray, a twelve-year-old Texan who, according to police, was raped and murdered by two illegal immigrants from Venezuela. At rallies, Trump portrays Harris as an active accomplice in these deaths. In Wisconsin, Trump said that Harris had effectively “murdered” them, “just like she had a gun in her hand.” In Atlanta, he declared Harris as responsible for Riley’s death “as though she were watching it herself.” At the recent Georgia rally, he added a promise to impose the death penalty on any undocumented migrant who kills an American citizen.
Conservative media has adopted Trump’s framing: Fox News’s Bret Baier, in a combative interview with Harris on October 16th, demanded that she personally apologize to the three victims’ families. And many of the pro-Trump television commercials airing in swing states star Riley and the other native-born women. One asks ominously, “How will your family survive another four years if you may not be able to survive the night?” According to the research firm AdImpact, a group called Right for America is paying $4.1 million to broadcast the commercial in Atlanta, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.
Fearmongering over the threat that illegal immigration poses to native-born white women is misleading at best. Crime statistics show that illegal immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit violent crimes. Alex Nowrasteh, of the libertarian Cato Institute, has used data from Texas, which tracks criminals’ immigration status, to calculate that illegal immigrants are twenty-six per cent less likely than the native-born to be convicted of homicide. (Legal immigrants are sixty-one per cent less likely.)
Moreover, when illegal immigrants do kill, they are exceedingly unlikely to murder native-born white women. Nationally, more than eighty per cent of homicide victims are men, and most people killed by illegal immigrants, Nowrasteh told me, “appear to be other illegal immigrants.” Yet the “rare” cases of native-born white women get all the attention, he noted. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke University who has written about “racialized emotions,” told me, in an e-mail, that “the pain, tears, and emotions of white women and children reign supreme in society, but particularly in MAGA circles.” He continued, “Facts matter little in stories about immigrants engaging in crime against white women or children, as the emotional valence overwhelms reason.” These stories “fit the larger narrative that has been brewing in white America for a while: they are taking over; blacks, Latinos, and ‘illegals’ are changing ‘our country.’ ”
Indeed, Georgia is now a swing state in part because the white, non-Hispanic population is teetering on the brink of minority status—it is at about fifty per cent, down from about sixty-three per cent in 2000. (The shift reflects an influx of Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Asian Americans; Georgia’s Black population has basically held steady, at about thirty per cent.) But the state’s coming majority still lacks voting power: a disproportionate share of the nonwhite population is under eighteen, and many Latinos are non-citizens. According to 2020 exit polls, white Georgians made up about sixty per cent of the voters. And seventy per cent of those white voters cast ballots for Trump.
Adelina Nicholls, the executive director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, bluntly attributes the Republican preoccupation with Riley to “racism and xenophobia.” She told me, “What they are trying to do is make everybody who is white fear all these immigrants.” I met Latinos in Athens who said that—regardless of their immigration status—they had felt a surge in hostility after Ibarra was named Riley’s killer. There were threats on social media. Latino children were bullied in schools to the point that parents started keeping their kids home. The Pinewoods Library, an informal community center that is in a trailer park with a large Latino population, drew about two hundred scared neighbors to a meeting where the local sheriff and the Athens district attorney, Deborah Gonzalez, sought to assure them of their safety. (The meeting wasn’t announced publicly, for security reasons.) A librarian who attended told me, “It was the whole Hispanic community—everybody was blamed.”
Gonzalez, a progressive who was elected in 2020, is the first Latina to occupy that role in a Georgia county. She told me that she quickly handed the Riley case to an outside prosecutor from a state agency, noting, “I didn’t want people to start thinking, ‘Oh, she’s a Latina, she is going to be easy on him.’ ” After the killing, more than a hundred people protested outside Athens’s city hall, under a Trump-esque banner declaring “Make Athens Safe Again”; speakers vowed to vote Gonzales out of office this fall for failing to deter such criminality. (A frequent critique is that she promised at the start of her term never to seek the death penalty. Ibarra faces life in prison without a chance for parole.) Her critics, including some Democrats, say that their main complaint is her ineffectiveness. But Gonzalez, who told me that she found a wire noose outside her house soon after she took office, blames much of the criticism she has faced regarding Riley’s murder on xenophobia. She said, “Unfortunately, here in Georgia, we still have many racist people.”
Trump supporters have insisted that there is nothing racist about their opposition to Gonzalez, or about their preoccupation with the killings of Riley and the other native-born women. Houston Gaines, a Republican who represents Athens in the Georgia statehouse and whose seat Gonzalez previously held, told me that the murder has only brought national attention to her being a “bad D.A.” Building America’s Future, the pro-Trump group linked to Elon Musk, followed up its initial ads about Riley’s death with three digital spots about the murder. One declared that the killing was evidence “Trump was right” when he notoriously asserted, in 2015, that Mexico was “sending rapists” over the border. Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for Building America’s Future, told me it was “complete nonsense” to suggest that the group was pandering to racial resentments, because the issue was the killer’s immigration status, not his ethnicity. “The race, color, or creed of these disgusting killers are irrelevant—what matters is that these innocent young women could be alive today if the Biden-Harris administration had enforced the laws” at the border. Whenever Democrats were on the wrong side of an issue, Romeo said, “they say it is racist.”
Jesse Petrea, a Republican state representative and one of Georgia’s most outspoken opponents of illegal immigration, told me he didn’t dispute that the undocumented were less likely to commit crimes than the native-born were. He also agreed that other immigrants were, by far, the most common victims of crimes committed by migrants. In fact, Petrea told me that he’d often complained that immigrant-on-immigrant violence wasn’t receiving enough attention. He cited the case of Maria Diaz, a twenty-eight-year-old from Douglas, Georgia, whose disappearance last year police have blamed on an illegal immigrant from Mexico. “Nobody seems interested in her,” Petrea told me, blaming bias in the news media for disproportionate coverage of white victims. Petrea told me that his message is that every act of violence by someone who crossed the border illegally is outrageous, because it is “by definition avoidable.”
Partisans on both sides of the issue agree that the Trump campaign and its allies have capitalized effectively on the deaths of Riley and the other native-born women. Various Republicans told me, with satisfaction, that Biden not only interrupted his State of the Union speech to respond to heckling about Riley; his Administration responded to Trump’s alarms about a deadly migrant “invasion” by tightening border restrictions. Romeo, of Building America’s Future, told me that, in politics, “you can measure your success by what your opponent does.”
In Georgia, advocates and opponents of tightening immigration laws told me that Riley’s murder has already moved the state to the right. Immediately after her death, the state legislature stunned civil-rights advocates by passing a sweeping law that, among other things, imposes criminal penalties on any law-enforcement officer who fails to check the citizenship status of a suspect or defendant, or to report the undocumented to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Conservative lawmakers in several other states have now introduced similar bills.
Riley’s name has become a household word across Georgia, where many families aspire to send their children to college in Athens. Yard signs around the state bear such slogans as “Laken Riley: Who’s Next?” and “Remember Laken Riley When You Vote.” The episode has become so notorious that even former President Bill Clinton recently brought up the murder. On a visit to stump for Harris, he argued that proposed border legislation that Biden had backed—and Trump had helped kill—could have prevented murders like Riley’s by keeping out dangerous migrants. Clinton’s remarks made headlines, with the Trump campaign characterizing them as an admission that the current Administration’s failure to protect the border led to Riley’s death.
If Trump narrowly wins Georgia, and with it the White House, historians may look back at Riley’s murder as a critical factor—with Jose Ibarra remembered as the Willie Horton of 2024. Charles S. Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, told me that Riley’s killing had touched a nerve “because, at least in rural Georgia, it fits in with this concern that ‘my world is changing—when I go to the Dollar General or the discount mall, on certain days there are all these Hispanics there, all these people speaking a strange language.’ ” Trump, Bullock continued, “is promising to turn back the clock, to get you back to an America that you knew and liked, before all this change in the ethnic makeup of your own community.”
Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant based in Georgia, put it another way. “Massive demographic change in a short amount of time brings friction, but no one is allowed to talk about those feelings—people know what social sanction comes with that,” he told me. “But they can talk about a murder.” ♦
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Publish date : 2024-10-29 00:26:00
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