The Trump administration is not keen on letting opportunities for the politicization of a tragedy pass them by. President Donald Trump and his cronies rushed to use the alleged undocumented immigrant status of the man who killed Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts as fodder in their ongoing war on immigration. Now, though, the murderer’s legal team claims that he has actually been working legally in the United States for years.
Cristhian Bahena Rivera’s attorney Allen Richards revealed as much in a request for a gag order covering the case that he filed this week. In his filing, he bemoaned the fat that President Trump himself has already weighed in on the tragedy, commenting:
‘Sad and sorry Trump has weighed in on this matter in national media which will poison the entire possible pool of jury members.’
Other politicians have weighed in on the case too, like Iowa’s Republican governor Kim Reynolds, who said:
‘We are angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community, and we will do all we can [to] bring justice to Mollie’s killer.’
Despite Republicans’ claims of a broken immigration system being at fault, Richards alleges that his client has been legally working in Iowa for Yarrabee Farms for at least four years.
The Lang family is behind that farming company, and Craig Lang is a prominent Iowa Republican who, among other things, launched a failed bid to be the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture. He lost in the Republican primary held earlier this year, finishing in third place with around 16,500 votes. Outside of that race, he has served in roles including vice chair of the Iowa Economic Development Board, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, and president of the state’s Board of Regents, which oversees Iowa’s public universities.
His family farm initially claimed that they’d vetted Rivera through the government’s E-Verify program, which allows employers to “electronically confirm the employment eligibility of their employees,” according to the website. They eventually retracted that claim, though. Yarrabee Farms doesn’t even participate in the E-Verify system. They now claim, though, that Rivera had presented false identification, including a faked Social Security card, and that’s what they checked.
It’s unclear if, in the face of that retraction, there’s any further standing for Rivera’s attorney’s claim that his client was legally employed in the U.S. His request for a gag order covering the case was denied.
The White House has cast the whole ordeal as justification for their harsh immigration policies, which have included the separation of undocumented immigrant families at the southern U.S. border. In a video production posted to Twitter Wednesday, they called families who have lost a member to violence at the hand of undocumented immigrants “permanently separated.”
For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first-degree murder, led police to the cornfield where her body was found.
The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone. pic.twitter.com/BBskwHEJoU
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 22, 2018
At least one member of Tibbetts’ own family, though, is uninterested in the right’s politicization.
In reply to prominent conservative commentator Candace Owens, they tweeted:
‘I’m a member of Mollie’s family and we are not so fucking small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals. now stop being a fucking snake and using my cousins death as political propaganda.’
Trump and his cronies, though, seem determined to press on.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
