Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
As the legal saga over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador continues in the courts, the political battle over the Trump administration’s handling of the case is really sizzling. Team Trump has stepped up its argument that Democratic and civil-libertarian sympathy for Abrego Garcia’s plight betrays indifference to the victims of illegal-immigrant crime. The most stunning example of this classic whataboutism tactic came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who showed up at her April 16 briefing for reporters with a “special guest”: Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel Morin was killed by an undocumented immigrant. The Maryland resident wanted to know why her senator, Chris Van Hollen, was more interested in repatriating Abrego Garcia than in protecting constituents like her late daughter from people like him.
Morin previously spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention as one of several “angel families” who blamed the deaths of their loved ones on the Biden administration’s immigration policies and urged voters to elect Donald Trump president to vindicate their memories. Now the Trump administration’s political weaponization of parents’ grief has become relentless: A couple of days after Leavitt’s stunt, border czar Tom Homan went on ABC’s This Week to ask, “How many angel moms and dads has [Van Hollen] met in the state of Maryland?”
To be clear, there is nothing more heartrending than a parent’s grief over the death of a child, regardless of its circumstances. The violent death of a child at another’s hand is even more horrific, and it’s natural for the victim’s family to examine ways that this disaster might have been avoided. In every murder, had the perpetrator not been present, the crime would not have been committed. But that does not mean the immigration status of the killer was the crucial factor or that others with the same immigration status are a deadly threat to public safety.
It’s telling that the lurid claims repeatedly made by Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and Karoline Leavitt about America being besieged by some sort of immigrant-crime wave are invariably anecdotal. As best we can tell from statistics and studies of statistics, undocumented immigrants are actually less likely than legal immigrants or U.S. citizens to commit violent crimes, and crime generally was down during the post-pandemic period when illegal border crossings reached their peak.
There are, however, categories of people who are significantly more prone than others to commit violent crimes. The vast majority of murderers, for example, are young men. Should young men as a class be given fewer due-process rights than women or older men? It might reduce the crime rate, but it’s obviously not the sort of thing we would do in 21st-century America.
Chris Van Hollen did not hang his head in shame over Team Trump’s accusations that his priorities are perverse. Instead, the senator had the appropriate reaction to claims that his efforts to bring justice to Kilmar Abrego Garcia dishonored the memory of Rachel Morin during an appearance on Meet the Press:
My heart goes out to the Morin family. They suffered, experienced an unspeakable tragedy in the murder of their daughter. And I— I said at the time that my heart goes out to the Morin family. And I’m very glad that the killer of Rachel has been convicted in a court of law. That is how we hold guilty people accountable. The courts of law are also where people get to have their due process so we don’t unfairly punish people who don’t have criminal records. And so my view is you can crack down and hold guilty people accountable and also respect the due-process rights of everybody who is in court. And I’m not sure why Abrego Garcia’s rights should be denied based on an awful murder that he had absolutely nothing to do with.
An even more basic point, of course, is that the evidence Abrego Garcia was any kind of “criminal” other than someone who broke immigration laws is very shaky, and the kind of allegations that Trump himself is throwing around (like the Photoshopped imposition of gang tattoos) need to be aired and judged in a court of law, not in press conferences or on social media. It’s true that a lot of Americans don’t know or care much about “due process” and probably don’t much buy into the presumption of innocence, either. But up until now our country’s Constitution and laws, and the institutions set up to enforce them, have exhibited a more rigorous sense of right and wrong than the rough and often brutal justice offered by MAGA culture warriors.
