WHAT MOLLIE TIBBETTS' FAMILY REALLY THINKS ABOUT THE POLITICIZATION OF HER MURDER
BY WILLIAM KENNEDY/JUNE 14, 2022 9:32 AM EDT
The 2018 killing of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, a crime for which an undocumented Mexican immigrant named Cristhian Bahena Rivera was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, came in the midst of divisive and heated political rhetoric over illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the Des Moines Register explains. Because of this, some members of the Republican Party, led at the time by then-President Donald Trump, chose to leverage the Tibbetts case for political capital, both at the state and the federal level.
In doing so, those politicians seemed intent to further their tough-on-immigration agenda, which at that point included building a wall to purportedly stop the flow of immigration between the two countries, as was a central tenet in the Trump administration's platform, based on reporting from US News & World Report. In the aftermath of Tibbetts' killing, and the subsequent conviction of an undocumented Mexican national — who later appealed his sentence, per Des Moines news outlet, KCCI — the young student's family spoke out to the press about the politics surrounding her death.
IOWA REPUBLICANS AND 2 MEMBERS OF THE TRUMP FAMILY REFERENCED TIBBETS' KILLING
At the time that Mollie Tibbets was stabbed to death and left in a cornfield near her home in Brooklyn, Iowa, the state had a Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and two Republican senators. All three spoke out regarding the tragedy. In a statement the governor made at the time, she referenced the murder. In it, she also mentioned how "a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community," per the official website of the Iowa governor's office. Similar comments were also made by Iowa's two GOP senators.
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