To the editor:
For every Laken Riley raped and murdered by an undocumented immigrant, there are two Laken Rileys raped and murdered by home-grown Americans. These victims had names like Alyssa Lokits and Josefina Cunningham, and their cases were every bit as terrible. Josefina was three years old.
It’s certainly a good thing to deport criminals who are here illegally. In his first 4 years, Obama deported 1,492,138, in his second 1,568,218. But Trump has made this a media event with quotas and great pressure on ICE, sheriffs, and the border patrol, and little or no time for vetting their prisoners.
As a former senior official at ICE said, it means “a vast increase in arrests of migrants with no criminal records.” At the same time, they’ll be taken out of the work force. They don’t deserve it. They’re good people, and we need them.
There’s no plague of foreign invaders, wreaking havoc. In fact, violent crime went down during the Biden administration. So, why does Trump want to scare us? Why did he repeatedly tell us that “these migrants are stone-cold killers.” and that “they’ll walk into your kitchen, and they’ll cut your throat?”
There are two answers. One is that fear works in an election. The second is that it draws attention away from what’s really scary: the rapid conversion of our democracy into an oligarchy of the very rich, run by a boss. The blueprint for this is Project 2025, which Trump is now following to the letter.
Porter Abbott Northport
