Suspect in Mollie Tibbets' Killing Used Stolen ID to Obtain Work in Iowa, Official Says. New York Times switches Headline again.

[But But Sanctuary Cities! Blue Wave! Obama Democrats Murdering Americans!]

This is what the assholes at the NY Times changed it to. Bing
fucked them over keeping the old headline.

"Killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa Inflames Immigration Debate"

BROOKLYN, Iowa — Television cameras had for weeks swarmed this
small town in Iowa farm country as the police looked for Mollie
Tibbetts, the college student who went for a jog last month and
never returned home.

After hundreds of tips and interviews, and after countless
prayer vigils and donations to a reward fund, investigators got
a tragic break in their case on Tuesday. A body believed to be
Ms. Tibbetts’s was found buried beneath cornstalks on a farm
outside town. The authorities charged Cristhian Rivera, who they
said is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, with first-degree
murder in her death.

President Trump and other conservatives quickly cited the arrest
of Mr. Rivera, who worked on a farm owned by a prominent
Republican family, as proof of the flawed immigration system and
lax border security the president has long warned about.

Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, released a statement
saying she was “angry that a broken immigration system allowed a
predator like this to live in our community.” And the White
House Twitter account posted a video with the emotional accounts
of people whose family members had been killed by immigrants who
entered the country illegally.

“Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently
separated from her family,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday evening in
a Twitter message, a clear reference to his much criticized
policy that tried to deter illegal border crossings by
separating migrant families.

“A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her. We need
the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, we need our
border laws changed, we need Republicans to do it because the
Democrats aren’t going to do it,” he said.



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Mr. Rivera’s lawyer, Allan M. Richards, disputed the
government’s claims that his client was in the country illegally
and said Mr. Trump’s comments highlighting his immigration
status could prejudice future jurors. Mr. Richards said his
client, who was ordered held on $5 million cash bond during a
brief court appearance on Wednesday, came to the United States
at age 17, had the equivalent of a middle school education and
had worked for years tending to dairy cows.

“For sad and sorry Trump to say that they’re illegal without
even giving them a hearing is totally wrong,” Mr. Richards said
in an interview after the court hearing.

Mr. Rivera’s arrest was a lead story for much of Tuesday evening
and Wednesday on several conservative-leaning news websites, and
was touted as a boost to the Trump administration’s argument for
a more hard-line stance on immigration. The arrest came in the
same week that an undocumented immigrant from Mexico was charged
with second-degree murder in a Minnesota case.

Mr. Trump is expected to continue to push immigration as a
signature issue in courting voters ahead of November’s midterm
elections. In Iowa, Republicans are defending two congressional
seats that Democrats have high hopes of winning, and Governor
Reynolds is seeking a full term in her post.

The discovery of Ms. Tibbetts’s body devastated her hometown,
Brooklyn, where she had returned for the summer after studying
psychology at the University of Iowa. After weeks of anxiously
awaiting news, some residents said Wednesday that they were
frustrated to learn that the suspect in her death was in the
country illegally.

“Mollie would still be alive today if we would just enforce the
laws we already have in place,” said Kerry Traver, 73, who lives
in nearby Marengo. “Here illegally and nobody’s doing anything
about it.”

Rusty Clayton, owner of True Value Hardware in Brooklyn, said
customers in the small town — where doors are seldom locked —
have been coming in to have house keys made ever since news
broke that Ms. Tibbetts was missing. But he said the town views
its Hispanic residents not as outsiders, but as members of the
community.

“Their kids go to our school,” Mr. Clayton said. “One was
homecoming king, and another of the students has been
valedictorian of the class. The kids here well respect them and
interact with them.”

Immigration has long been a divisive issue in Iowa, where
farmers depend on foreign-born laborers to tend their crops and
livestock, but where an influx of Hispanic residents has exposed
tensions in some cities. While Iowa politicians from both major
parties offered condolences to the Tibbetts family, Republicans
were more likely to note Mr. Rivera’s immigration status in
their statements.

Image
Cristhian Bahena Rivera
CreditIowa Department of Public Safety, via Associated Press
Outside the state, advocates for immigrants lamented that Ms.
Tibbetts’s death was being used for political gains.

“It is unfortunate that lawmakers are politicizing this
absolutely awful tragedy,” said Ali Noorani, executive director
of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization.
“One would wish that cooler heads would prevail and that we
could have a rational, humane conversation about immigration
policy.”

Though statistics show that native-born Americans commit crimes
at higher rates than immigrants, Mr. Trump has long pushed a
narrative that suggests otherwise.

The White House regularly sends out emails reporting the latest
crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. “Ethiopian human
rights abuser arrested for fraudulently obtaining U.S.
citizenship,” one such missive announced last week.

In June, Mr. Trump gathered at the White House a group of so-
called “angel families” who had lost loved ones in crimes
committed by “criminal illegal aliens” — victims of Salvadoran
gangs, heroin overdoses, robbers, convicts released from prison
but not deported.

“These are the stories that Democrats and people that are weak
on immigration, they don’t want to discuss, they don’t want to
hear, they don’t want to see, they don’t want to talk about,”
Mr. Trump said in greeting the families.

In recent campaign rallies, like one Tuesday night in which he
alluded to Ms. Tibbetts, Mr. Trump has riled up crowds by
disparaging immigrants and stoking fear about them, saying that
he would send them “the hell back” to their countries of origin.
And he has constantly reiterated his belief that a vote for a
Democratic candidate in the midterms would be a vote for open
borders. (Legislation shows that Democrats support border
security measures, but not the wall that Mr. Trump has promised
his supporters.)

Mr. Rivera’s arrest also raised questions about the process
companies use to check whether job applicants are allowed to
work in the United States. Mr. Rivera’s employer, Yarrabee
Farms, said initially that the federal government had cleared
Mr. Rivera for work through its well-known E-Verify system. But
on Wednesday evening, Yarrabee corrected itself and said he had
been checked through a different Social Security Administration
database.

Both systems are vulnerable to fraud when applicants present
valid documents that belong to someone else, experts said.

“If I’m using your number and your name, that’s going to get
through,” said Julie Myers Wood, who led Immigration and Customs
Enforcement during George W. Bush’s presidency. She said
unauthorized job seekers were using stolen documents to thwart E-
Verify even during her tenure.

But Ms. Myers Wood said the Social Security database was not
intended to check employment eligibility, and that the farm was
“not in as strong as a position” as it would have been had it
used E-Verify.

Federal officials appeared to have reviewed Mr. Rivera’s
immigration status and said they had placed an immigration hold
on him, requiring him to be turned over to immigration
authorities should he clear state criminal proceedings. He is
“an illegal alien from Mexico,” said Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman
for ICE.

A senior homeland security official, who spoke anonymously
because he was not authorized to discuss the case, said Mr.
Rivera appears to have used stolen documentation in order to
pass the federal government identity check at the farm where he
had worked for the past several years.

Dane Lang, a spokesman for Yarrabee Farms, said Mr. Rivera
provided a state-issued photo identification card and a social
security card. “Our practice is to take a second, enhanced step
to verify the identification,” he said in a statement, screening
employees through the Social Security Administration.

“We ran that information through the verification service, and
it came back ‘verified,’” he said. “That means that the exact
name, birthdate and exact social security number were all cross
referenced and corroborated.”

Over the last 24 hours, Mr. Lang added, company officials
learned that their verification had not been adequate. “Our
employee was not who he said he was.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/us/mollie-tibbetts-cristhian-
rivera.html
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