美国国家公共电台 NPR Spotlight On Migrant Crimes Drums Up Support For Trump's Immigration Dragnet

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

President Trump 1 regularly spotlights 2 violent crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally. His administration has pledged to deport 3 more of these so-called bad hombres. That outrage 4 is increasingly bubbling up in communities across this country, but to what end? NPR's John Burnett has our story.

JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE 5: Early last month, San Antonio residents listening to the evening news on KENS 6 TV heard a particularly grim crime story.

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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #1: Good evening. A man charged with shooting and killing 7 a pregnant teen is now behind bars.

UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR #2: Police arrested 35-year-old Armando Rodrigo Garcia-Ramirez (ph) for shooting and killing 15-year-old Jennifer Delgado.

BURNETT: Police said the slain 8 teenager was nine months pregnant with the man's child. The fetus 9 died too. Today, Garcia-Ramirez is charged with double capital murder. And there's more. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirms that he's a Mexican national who was in the United States illegally. Under the Obama administration, Garcia-Ramirez was twice picked up by immigration agents, released both times and later granted a work permit.

The San-Antonio-pregnant-teenager double murder enraged 10 conservatives across the spectrum 11. In Washington, Senator Charles Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees 12 immigration, fired off a letter to ICE demanding answers. Breitbart featured the story prominently, and it popped up on scores of right-wing websites.

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GEORGE RODRIGUEZ: Howdy, howdy, my friends. George Rodriguez, El Conservador, talking to you from San Antonio deep in the heart of south Texas. Let's talk about immigration news today.

BURNETT: George Rodriguez writes a blog and does an Internet radio show under the name El Conservador, the conservative. Once a week, he writes about the worst crimes he can find committed by unauthorized immigrants. He sat down for an interview last week.

RODRIGUEZ: And once a week, I come up with at least five, six of them committed in diverse places, like Minnesota. There was a case in Massachusetts not too long ago that I read about where a teacher was murdered by her illegal immigrant boyfriend. They're everywhere.

BURNETT: The boyfriend in that case has pleaded not guilty. No one argues these are serious crimes, and the victims deserve our sympathy. But critics believe that focusing on the birthplace and immigration status of a criminal demonizes all unauthorized immigrants.

JONATHAN RYAN: This attempt to use an anecdote 13 to try to set up a false paradigm 14 that there are good immigrants or bad immigrants is really just an attempt to call all immigrants bad.

BURNETT: Jonathan Ryan is an immigration attorney in San Antonio and director of a nonprofit called RAICES that advocates for immigrants. He sits in a coffee shop for an interview. The point Ryan and others make is that a defendant 15 should be charged, tried and adjudicated on the facts of the crime, not his immigration status.

RYAN: We undermine that criminal justice system. By saying that immigrants need some kind of separate system of justice, what we're really doing is saying that we don't trust and we don't believe in our own Constitution that affords fundamental rights, including due process, to all people in this country - immigrant, nonimmigrant.

BURNETT: But wait. Immigration hardliners insist that's not their point. El Conservador blogger George Rodriguez returns to the San Antonio murders.

RODRIGUEZ: If he had been detained and deported 16 for being here illegally the first time around, the impregnation, the murder, the crime would have been avoided.

BURNETT: What the public should be outraged 17 about is the uneven 18 enforcement of immigration laws, says Jessica Vaughan. She tweets prolifically 19 on immigrant crimes at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports Trump's crackdown.

JESSICA VAUGHAN: But I don't think that that translates into a generalized hostility 20 toward immigrants.

BURNETT: For well over a century, immigrants have faced hostility in the United States, going back to Italians, Poles and Irish. Social science research stretching back almost as far has consistently found there is no link between immigrants and criminality. The contemporary question is whether studies find a correlation 21 between immigrants who are here unlawfully and crime.

On this question, there is a paucity 22 of research. Bianca Bersani, a criminologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston, investigates immigration and crime. She says more and more researchers are looking at this subset of unauthorized immigrants who are much in the news. And as data become available...

BIANCA BERSANI: So far, the research is not finding that the undocumented is offending or being re-arrested at rates that are any different from the U.S.-born population.

BURNETT: What is certain is the abundance of attention being paid to the worst immigrant crimes, whether justified 23 or not, helps to drum up support for the president's aggressive immigration dragnet. John Burnett, NPR News, San Antonio.