Trump and Republicans have made the Iowa student’s death an immigration issue even as family and friends call for healing

Mollie Tibbetts seemed to be inexhaustible. She was a cross-country runner, and a state-level competitive public speaker; she was active at church and was spending her college summer vacation working at a day camp helping children with literacy and crafts.

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She was studying psychology at the University of Iowa and according to one of her friends who spoke to the Des Moines Register, she was “already everybody’s counsellor”.

In June, she took the role of “best man” at her dad’s wedding and gave a toast that reduced family and friends to tears.

For five long weeks this summer, the 20-year-old’s smiling face has shone from missing posters and button badges, on lawn signs in the tiny Iowa city of Brooklyn and social media messages that have drawn sympathy and concern around the world.

She had last been seen going for an evening run, heading east out of town on 18 July.

A hopeful, painful search – in the ponds, farm buildings and fields of the rural community 80 miles east of Des Moines – ended on Tuesday with the grim announcement that a body had been discovered, hidden in a cornfield about 12 miles from town.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old dairy farm worker from Mexico, who had apparently used a false identity to conceal the fact he was an undocumented immigrant, was charged with her murder.

Video footage of his car going back and forth near the scene of Mollie’s disappearance led police to him. Court documents show that after his arrest, Rivera soon led police to the body.

He admitted getting out of his car and running alongside Mollie, becoming upset when she said she would call the police. The affidavit says he claimed to have “blocked” his memory of events until he “noticed there was an ear piece from headphones in his lap and that is how he realized he had put her in the trunk”.

Within hours, Donald Trump had turned the murder into ugly election-year politics, using a speech at one of his typically angry rallies.

“Should have never happened … the immigration laws are such a disgrace,” he told a noisy crowd in West Virginia, a message repeated on the White House’s Twitter account.

Trump had endured a tough Tuesday, rocked first by the fraud trial guilty verdicts of his ex-campaign chief Paul Manafort, moments later by the guilty pleas of his long-term fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen told a New York court Trump directed him to break campaign finance laws with secret payments to silence two women from talking about alleged affairs with the presidential candidate.

By Wednesday, as Washington woke to renewed talk of possible impeachment, Trump was anxious to change the subject. He released a video address that began: “Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family.”

The language was a deliberate echo of criticism Trump has faced for hardline immigration policies that have forcibly separated thousands of children from their parents.

Members of the Tibbetts family denounced attempts to politicise her murder. Her aunt Billie Jo Calderwood wrote on Facebook: “Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color. Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races.”

But for Trump, rightwing media and many Republicans fighting to hang on in November elections, Mollie Tibbetts’ death is a political opportunity – to rekindle that “build the wall” anti-immigrant passion which helped elect Trump two years ago.

As the Trump loyalist and former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich told Axios: “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.”

By Thursday, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, was blaming the American media, insisting “the CNNs, the MSNBCs, most of the print media in this country, and the Democrats, they are all accomplices in the death of this young girl”.

One of Fox News’ own presenters, Geraldo Rivera, rejected the way the conservative channel was spinning the events in Iowa. “This is a murder story,” he said on air. “It’s not an immigration story.”

‘If we want to heal we need to forgive’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Friends and family of Mollie Tibbetts react during a news conference on Tuesday. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

In Brooklyn, Iowa, the parish council member Mary Jo Seaton helped organise a vigil for Mollie on Wednesday at St Patrick’s Catholic church. She said: “This isn’t about immigration right now, or race, or any of that, this is about Mollie. This is Mollie’s time. That’s the feeling.”

Seaton added: “Mollie used to come to church with her grandmother. She was just a girl with a lot of spirit, a happy-go-lucky girl, someone that was loved by everyone. She touched a lot of people’s lives.”

The vigil at St Patrick’s drew around 250 people, including Mollie’s grandmother, and high school students who knew Mollie. The Rev Corey Close preached a message of forgiveness, Seaton said.

“People who listened to the pastor’s message would learn that there is evil everywhere and it’s something you can’t rationalise.

“He didn’t expect us to walk out the door that night just to forgive, but in the fullness of time, trying to forgive is going to help. If we want to heal, we need to forgive.”

On Sunday at 2pm, a funeral mass will be held at Tibbetts’ old high school gymnasium. The church will not be big enough to hold all of the mourners.

“The past five weeks the community has pulled together,” Seaton said. “The community was together from day one, everyone pitched in and there was a lot of hope to bring Mollie home. We did bring Mollie home, but not in the sense that we all hoped for.”

The summer of anxiety has changed the small community, a modest downtown surrounded by farmland and known as the City of Flags, which draws travellers taking a break from the I-80 interstate to see its display of flags from every state.

“Things have changed,” Seaton said, “in terms of looking at how we live. We leave our doors unlocked and we leave the keys in our cars, kids run down the street to go out and play. I’m not saying we still don’t, but it’s more of a guarded thing.

“I hope in time that will also heal and we’ll get back to that sense of still feeling safe in our community.”

‘Our employee was not who he said he was’

The Lang family, which employed the alleged killer for four years at Yarabee Farms, just outside Brooklyn, have reported receiving death threats. They initially said he had been vetted using the government’s E-Verify system, but later said Rivera had supplied fake ID and social security documents.

“What we learned within the last 24 hours is that our employee was not who he said he was,” Dane Lang told a press conference.

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Although Rivera’s employers tried to ensure he was authorised to work, undocumented workers are a fact of life on farms across Iowa and the US. Iowa has a small but growing immigrant population, put at 148,000 people, or 4.8% of the state population, according to research by the American Immigration Council. The study estimates there are 40,000 undocumented immigrants in Iowa.

The US Department of Labor’s national agricultural workforce survey shows 47% of the farming workforce across the US is working without legal authority. The rest of the workforce is made up of 31% US citizens, 21% permanent residents and 1% foreigners with work visas.

Iowa has an ageing and declining population and depends on foreign-born workers. According to a study this year by Iowa State University, agricultural jobs would decline if there were a loss of foreign workers, because native-born Americans would not fill the jobs and farmers and producers would have to cut output.

While agriculture lobbies hard in Washington for a pragmatic approach to foreign workers, Republicans have long resisted the idea of tying greater border security into a range of immigration reforms, including offering a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the US.

Fear-mongering conservatives are quick to highlight instances of immigrants and crime. But the most authoritative research shows that illegal immigrants are less likely to be convicted for murder than native-born Americans.

Alex Nowrasteh, who co-authored that study at the Cato Institute libertarian thinktank, wrote this week that his work showed that in Texas, the only state that keeps data on the number of undocumented immigrants convicted for specific crimes, native-born Americans were convicted of homicide at a rate of 3.2 per 100,000 people, compared with a homicide conviction rate for undocumented immigrants of 1.8 per 100,000.

He criticised those whipping up a political firestorm, writing: “They want to convict all illegal immigrants of this murder in the court of public opinion, not just the actual murderer.”

Trump has consistently exploited fears over immigration and crime since the launch of his campaign. As the midterms approach, he is trying to claim that work has begun on his border wall. In reality Congress has only agreed to $1.6bn to replace a few existing stretches of fencing, rather than the $25bn Trump wanted.

Frank Sharry, of the pro-immigration group American Voices, described Trump’s exploitation of the murder of Mollie Tibbetts as “morally bankrupt and politically desperate”.

He said: “Trump won the election in part because he demonised the ‘other’. Trump was able to have a combined message that inflamed racial difference and talked about being a voice for the forgotten worker. Two years later, all he has on offer – apart from a tax cut that lined the pockets of the super rich – is inflaming racial tension, trying to encourage white Americans to fear brown people.

“The idea that Trump is going to go around the country screaming about brown criminals and white victims and that is going to turn the tide in the midterms is desperate and ugly and I don’t think it is going to work.

“It’s disgusting what they are doing and I think it’s going to backfire.”