Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and translator whose work focuses on migration, human rights and gender equality. She is based in Mexico City. Driver is the author of "More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico." The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) The man arrested in the death of Mollie Tibbetts is an undocumented immigrant, but this is a single story -- not a statistic -- although President Donald Trump and other Republican politicians would like to make it seem otherwise.

Alice Driver

Tibbetts, an Iowa college student, went missing in July and a body believed to be hers was found on Tuesday. After the arrest of Christhian Bahena Rivera (who according to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico) on first degree murder charges, Trump referred to Tibbetts' death (still not officially confirmed) and called the nation's immigration laws "a disgrace." The White House tweeted Tuesday: "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."

This tweet is part of a larger narrative that the White House has stoked, in which the issue of immigration policy -- specifically invoked in the same tweet by its reference to family separation -- becomes a code for selectively dehumanizing and criminalizing undocumented immigrants. The White House tweets about Mollie Tibbetts, but why not about other cases?

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At both the Republican National Convention in 2016 and the State of the Union in 2018, Trump had the family members of those murdered by illegal immigrants (to whom he refers as "Angel Families") share their stories. Then, as now, his evident aim was to make a handful of stories seem like a statistical norm.

The truth is that any young woman like Mollie Tibbetts (or myself) has a much greater chance of dying at the hands of a husband or boyfriend of any type than meeting harm at the hands of an undocumented immigrant in the United States. However, the White House immediately politicized the killing via its Twitter account, highlighting that the man charged with murder in Tibbetts' death is an "illegal alien," language that Trump has used consistently to dehumanize undocumented immigrants and to insinuate, despite evidence that shows the opposite , that undocumented immigrants are more criminal than other populations.