Arrest of immigrant in Mollie Tibbetts’s murder case prompts outrage from conservatives as they pivot away from Trump’s legal troubles in the wake of Manafort and Cohen verdicts

Republican leaders have seized on the arrest of an immigrant accused of murdering a young woman as they seek to return border security to the top of the political agenda and pivot away from Donald Trump’s legal troubles in the wake of the Manafort and Cohen cases.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old from Mexico, was charged with first-degree murder on Tuesday in the death of Mollie Tibbetts, a University of Iowa student who went missing on 18 July.



Senior Republicans hesitate to criticise Trump after Manafort and Cohen verdicts Read more

The gruesome killing induced widespread horror, shocked the midwest and was featured in the national news – but it also prompted an elevated level of attention and outrage from conservative politicians, including the president.

Republicans railed against Rivera as an “illegal alien”. And the White House on Wednesday tweeted a reference to Tibbetts alongside a video of families whose members had been killed by undocumented immigrants. In the tweet the phrase “permanently separated” was employed in order to highlight their loss.

The phrase is a riff on the highly controversial Trump immigration policy of forcibly separating children from their parents when family groups cross the border without authorization, which has sparked months of uproar from opponents of the policy. The relatives in the video have previously been invited to the White House.

But a lawyer representing Rivera asserted in a court filing on Wednesday that the man lives in the US legally.

A body thought to be that of 20-year-old Tibbetts was found in a cornfield near Brooklyn, a small town about 70 miles east of Des Moines, where police said she was going for a run in her last known sighting.

Rivera appeared in court on Wednesday. Tibbetts’ killing was the lead story for some rightwing media outlets in the same news cycle as the fraud convictions of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s erstwhile attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen.

Trump told the crowd at a rally in West Virginia on Tuesday evening: “You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in, very sadly, from Mexico and you saw what happened to that incredible, beautiful young woman.

“Should’ve never happened. Illegally in our country. We’ve had a huge impact, but the laws are so bad. The immigration laws are such a disgrace, we’re getting them changed, but we have to get more Republicans. We have to get ’em.”



Meanwhile Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the US House of Representatives, 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.”

Iowa: man living in US illegally charged with murder of student Mollie Tibbetts Read more

Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, said in a statement that “We are angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community, and we will do all we can to bring justice to Mollie’s killer.”

Trump has made building a southern border wall a central plank of his presidency and during his campaign he often referenced Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old who was shot dead in San Francisco in 2015. An undocumented Mexican immigrant who had been deported five times was acquitted of murder in 2017 after arguing her death was accidental.



According to an affidavit, video footage identified a Chevrolet Malibu that police say is linked to Rivera,who was tracking Tibbetts on her run. It states he got out of the car and started running next to her, prompting her to threaten to call the police.



The affidavit states that Rivera claimed his memory is “blocked” about what happened next, but he admitted seeing her earphones on his lap, dragging her out of the trunk of his car and leaving her bloodied body “covered in some corn leaves” in a “secluded location”. It adds that Rivera led police to the scene on Tuesday. An autopsy to determine the cause of death is expected to take place on Wednesday.

“I can’t speak about the motive. I can just tell you that it seemed that he followed her, seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day, for whatever reason he chose to abduct her,” Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent Rick Rahn told reporters.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said that it had lodged a federal immigration detainer for Rivera, a prelude to deportation, but Yarrabee Farms, where Rivera worked, said that he had passed a government background check. The dairy farm’s statement said he “has worked at our farms for four years, was vetted through the government’s E-Verify system, and was an employee in good standing”. The Des Moines Register reported that the business was owned by a prominent Iowa Republican family.

However, Dane Lang, the co-owner, walked back that statement to reporters on Wednesday afternoon and suggested that Rivera had provided false identification that was verified by a different system.

“What we learned in the last 24 hours is that our employee was not who he said he was and just within the last four hours we have come to learn that the Social Security Administration employment verification service is not the same as E-Verify. Our family member who handles the verification process believed the systems were the same. They are not the same systems,” he said.

Despite Trump’s attempts to link immigration with danger, studies have generally found that both legal and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than people born in the US. A 2018 report by the libertarian Cato Institute noted that research “shows that illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates nationwide … relative to native-born Americans”.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

