Yes, I know. The first two words in the title to this post say it all: Trump lied.
Of course he did. He lies all the time.
Why should he care? it’s a pattern for him. People call him on it, and then they forget it. His supporters don’t care, why should we, right?
Well, yeah, except that it might matter to the victim’s family. But they’re just roadkill for Trump. More fodder for his lies.
As reported by Hannah Knowles of the Washington Post:
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Donald Trump used his campaign event in Michigan on Tuesday to denounce what he called “Biden’s border bloodbath,” zeroing in on the case of a young woman killed by someone immigration officials say had entered the country illegally.
“She lit up that room, and I’ve heard that from so many people,” Trump said at a news conference in the hometown of the 25-year-old victim, Ruby Garcia. “I spoke to some of her family.”
But Garcia’s sister, acting as a family spokeswoman, said Tuesday that Trump and his campaign have not contacted her or other immediate relatives — and rebuked the GOP presidential nominee’s effort to make the case part of his calls for a border crackdown.
“It’s always been about illegal immigrants,” the victim’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told local news station Target 8. “Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”
Good question. When will Trump bring up the largest increase in rates of homicide ever recorded in American history on his watch? Or the once a month “most deadly mass shootings” that occurred, again, on his watch?
I guess those stats must have escaped him. But did he really have to make up a total lie about it? Pretending he talked to the victim’s family? How would you feel if he did that with your family?
As noted by Glenn Kessler, also writing for the Washington Post:
Never mind that violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharply during Biden’s presidency, after a surge during the pandemic. Trump, as he often did during his presidency, is using anecdotal evidence to make an emotional case against undocumented immigrants.
Of course, this must be liberal bias. A publication like Scientific American couldn’t be right, could they?
Studies overwhelmingly find no evidence that U.S. immigrants, including those who are undocumented, commit more crimes than native-born Americans. And now a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that draws from a detailed and well-sourced data set comes to an even more dramatic conclusion. It reports that between 2012 and 2018, compared with their U.S.-born neighbors, undocumented immigrants in Texas were less than half as likely to be arrested for violent crimes or drug offenses and less than a quarter as likely to be arrested for property crimes.
“Simply put, we found that undocumented immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than both legal immigrants and, especially, native-born U.S. citizens,” says study co-author Michael Light, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The whole line of “immigrant crime” is contrived bullshit. It’s all Fox News, “give-us-clicks” inspired propaganda. That’s all it is, and with Trump and his Republican party, that’s all it’s ever been. It’s the same pattern followed by all would-be demagogues. Demonize the immigrants, the “other.” And I’ll “protect” you.
I really, really hope this country doesn’t fall for it.