“Biden must pay for this. He keeps on complaining that it is the Republicans that is preventing the securing of the border. However, he cancelled ALL Trump’s border policies when he entered the office, but did nothing to replace those policies. Under Trump, the border was secured, now, it is a mess, an open door for all criminals into the US” – The current top comment on Fox News’s main front page article “Family of Laken Riley speaks out for first time since daughter’s tragic slaying: ‘Will be missed every day,’” about the murder of a 22 year-old University of Georgia nursing student, the prime suspect Jose Ibarra, a paroled Venezuelan migrant who entered the country in 2022.

This is horrific and Ibarra should be executed if found guilty in a court of law beyond any reasonable doubt. No qualification. Sick animals need to be put down no matter where they come from.

Separate from the crime is the craven reaction to it: MAGA Twitter is not quite wall-to-wall with it yet, but that’s probably only because of limited bandwidth after the South Carolina primary and other stories in a high-volume news cycle. Which is to say we don’t know how much mileage this is going to get outside of the MAGA media ecosystem yet, though it won’t be for lack of trying. The last time a white girl was killed by a migrant in an election year was in 2018 when University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbets was raped and murdered by Mexican farm laborer Cristhian Rivera (employed by a prominent Republican who once ran for state Argiculture Commissioner). So excited was Newt Gingrich that he emailed Axios to tell them “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc, then GOP could lose [the House] badly.” Then there was some Neo-Nazis who pushed a robocall about her death. Some asshole on The Hill even changed his Disqus name to “Midterms for Mollie” at one point.

One problem for the MAGA kids if they do want to celebrate Laken’s death loudly: Trump signed an order blocking the deportations of Venezuelan migrants on January 19, 2021.