House Republican lawmakers are being encouraged by their party’s leadership to play up gruesome murders, rapes, and other crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in the United States.
In a newsletter sent on Friday, House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., provided the caucus and staff with a messaging update that compiled immigrant crimes by date and congressional district.
The newsletter is used by the GOP caucus to provide talking points and messaging guidance.
The edition of the newsletter dealing with immigrant crimes offered a messaging opportunity to leverage the government shutdown against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
House Republican Conference Newsletter
“Speaker Pelosi made one thing clear during the government shutdown: she doesn’t care about the tragic consequences of illegal immigration on American families,” the newsletter says.
Under the header “The Democrats’ far-left immigration agenda has tragic real-world consequences,” the newsletter goes on to list crimes committed over the last two decades.
The list includes alleged crimes and points out which Republican House members’ districts the events took place in.
In one case, “an illegal immigrant from El Salvador was charged with murdering four people” in Rep. Mark Amodei’s Nevada district, the newsletter says.
In another, it recounts “the story of a 16-year-old, who was killed in 2000 by an illegal immigrant in a car crash on Father’s Day” in Rep. Barry Loudermilk’s Georgia district.
Yet another bullet point describes “an illegal immigrant who previously had been deported in 2015 for a felony drug trafficking conviction [who] was charged with first degree rape” in Rep. Gary Palmer’s Alabama district.
The congressional document mirrors recent tweets by President Trump linking crimes committed by immigrants to the need to expand the wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
Just before the midterm election last year, Trump tweeted a 53-second video featuring Luis Bracamontes boasting about murdering two sheriff’s deputies in 2014.
After the clip of Bracamontes, the video flashes text that claims, “Democrats let him into our country … Democrats let him stay.”
As independent fact-checkers noted, the message was highly misleading.
Bracamontes was deported under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The House Republican Conference messaging document includes several stories that were simply shared by Republican lawmakers without any names or news stories attached.
Studies have consistently shown that crime rates are actually lower among foreign immigrants than among native-born Americans.
But the strategy does not appear to be a fair-minded discussion of immigration policy — or crime, for that matter.