On the evening of February 23, reports spread that the suspect in the killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered while out jogging on the University of Georgia campus, had entered the US illegally.
That night, the conservative writer Ryan James Gidursky wrote in a viral post on X, “If only people went to the streets to demand change in the name of Laken Riley, like they did for George Floyd.”
Now, the Trump campaign is trying to make Riley the face of its argument that Joe Biden’s border policies have deadly consequences. During the State of the Union address, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) triggered an unscripted moment from Biden, in which he tried to address Riley’s death. Before a Georgia rally on March 9, Trump met some of Riley’s family members, while his campaign team handed out pictures of Riley to the crowd. And this past weekend, Trump mentioned Riley repeatedly at another rally in Ohio.
Trump has demagogued unauthorized immigrants as dangerous criminals since his first campaign for president, and this year he’s returning to that familiar theme, accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country.
But while he has hosted rallies before that featured family members of people killed by unauthorized immigrants, Riley’s death seems set up to be more central to his campaign messaging than any of these prior tragedies.
Trump evidently thinks he can lay it directly at his opponent’s feet, blaming Biden’s failure to control the border (and changing the subject from Trump’s own role in scuttling Biden’s bipartisan border security bill). He’s also trying to argue that Riley’s death isn’t an isolated tragedy, but part of a larger trend of “migrant crime” — once again smearing a vast and diverse group of people as criminals.
And now, activists and commentators on the right are blatantly trying to mirror the rhetoric and tactics used by activists against police violence. “Say her…
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