XPost: tx.politics, memphis.general, alt.appalachian   
   XPost: alt.history   
   From: criminally-complicit@sfchronicle.com   
      
   Go ahead and play your word games and tell me about the cruelty   
   of borders, the kindness of sanctuary cities and the political   
   wisdom of abolishing ICE.   
      
   Tell me about government’s lack of compassion, and of the   
   heartbreak of families separated from each other through broken   
   immigration policy.   
      
   Tell me how racist it is, how cruel it is to think that a nation   
   should control its own borders and stop, rather than reward,   
   illegal immigration.   
      
   And then tell me about Mollie Tibbetts.   
      
   The 20-year-old University of Iowa student was separated from   
   her family too.   
      
   She was separated from those she loved a month ago, when she   
   went jogging near her home near Des Moines. Her accused killer,   
   Cristhian Bahena Rivera, authorities said, was in the country   
   illegally. He worked at a large dairy farm owned by a prominent   
   Iowa Republican.   
      
   His lawyers, seeking a gag order in the case, insist Rivera is   
   here legally. The truth will eventually come out, as well as the   
   circumstances of her death, with an autopsy to be performed.   
      
   Investigators said her alleged killer stalked her, approached   
   her, then said he blacked out and couldn’t remember much. But he   
   remembered enough to help police find her body in a cornfield.   
      
   And ever since, Mollie Tibbetts has been pulled at by politics.   
      
   Democrats who want the Latino vote ignore her or they pivot,   
   smoothly, making their pitch for “compassionate” immigration   
   policy and attacking President Donald Trump.   
      
   Republicans who are pushing stronger border control use her as   
   an emotional symbol. Republicans whose agribusiness political   
   contributors want cheap labor for their packing houses and their   
   farms avoid her, as if she was never here.   
      
   Apparently, they really don’t mind a few dead Americans if they   
   can keep to their political talking points.   
      
   And Trump, who rode to the White House by tapping into a real,   
   desperate and bipartisan American desire to stop illegal   
   immigration, disfigures the debate. He exaggerates the threat of   
   crime by those in the country illegally, making it seem as if   
   they’re driving a violent national crime spree when statistics   
   say otherwise.   
      
   But victims of violent immigrants here illegally are more than   
   mere statistics or a point from which to pivot and attack.   
      
   They’re more than broken eggs in the political policy wars.   
      
   They were real people. They lived real lives. They were loved.   
   They were daughters and sons and husbands and wives. And they   
   are dead, the result of immigration policy and partisan politics.   
      
   Because if we actually did something about illegal immigration,   
   rather than shout at each other and play politics, Mollie   
   Tibbetts would be alive today.   
      
   She’d be alive like so many others would be alive.   
      
   Kate Steinle would be alive. She wouldn’t have died while   
   walking along a pier in San Francisco with her father when a   
   habitual criminal here illegally fired a gun. He claimed it was   
   all an accident and was acquitted of murder.   
      
   “Help me, Dad,” were her last words.   
      
   We don’t know the last words of Dennis McCann of Chicago. But   
   he’d be alive too.   
      
   Instead, McCann was dragged to his death under a car driven by a   
   drunk in Chicago in 2012. McCann was hit so hard that his shoes   
   were left on the pavement. The rest of him was pulled a half-   
   mile under the car along Logan Boulevard.   
      
   The drunk was jailed and charged, but under an allegedly   
   compassionate policy pushed by Cook County Democrats pandering   
   for Latino votes, the driver, Saul Chavez, was not held for   
   pickup by federal immigration authorities.   
      
   He was compassionately allowed to make bail. And once out on the   
   street, Saul Chavez fled back home to Mexico. And there were no   
   real answers for McCann’s horrified and stunned family.   
      
   All they were given were vague, political regrets and mind-   
   numbing Democratic Party talk by Cook County Board President   
   Toni Preckwinkle about process and writs. Preckwinkle’s a   
   powerful political boss. McCann is dead. Chavez is gone.   
      
   So please, tell me about political cruelty.   
      
   Trump vaulted to the top of the Republican presidential pile by   
   targeting illegal immigration. The Republican establishment was   
   not pleased. And Democrats campaigning against Trump use his   
   exaggerations as reason to avoid victims like Tibbetts.   
      
   Or step over them quickly, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a   
   Massachusetts Democrat and presumptive candidate for president,   
   did on CNN the other day.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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