Recently Molly Tibbetts, a young Iowan, was brutally killed. This is a terrible tragedy. Because the alleged killer is an immigrant, politicians and the media seized upon this to vilify all immigrants and justify their racist demonization, led by the white supremacist Trump administration.
But Molly’s family refused to allow this to happen, saying this is not what Molly stood for. This is what they said:
“The Hispanic community are Iowans,” he said during his eulogy this past Sunday, revealing that they “had embraced him as he searched for his daughter in recent weeks,” the Des Moines Register reported. “They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.”
The paper reported that during the several weeks Tibbetts was in Iowa searching for his daughter, “he ate at a number of Mexican restaurants, where employees were sensitive and kind. They knew when he needed space or when he needed to joke.” He continued: “Today, we need to turn the page. We’re at the end of a long ordeal. But we need to turn toward life—Mollie’s life—because Mollie’s nobody’s victim. Mollie’s my hero.” He hasn’t been the only member of Tibbetts’s family to reject the false narrative pushed onto her by anti-immigrant figures.
“No,” wrote her cousin Sandi Tibbetts Murphy in a Facebook post. “Especially for those of you who did not know her in life, you do not get to usurp Mollie and her legacy for your racist, false narrative now that she is no longer with us. We hereby reclaim our Mollie.” There’s still uncertainty regarding her alleged killer’s immigration status, but that doesn’t matter to the people doing the fearmongering anyway, because “immigrants-are-criminals” has always been their fall-back narrative despite the fact that immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crime. Enough, said Tibbetts’s cousin. “You do not have permission to callously use this tragedy to demonize an entire population for the acts of one man. No. We reclaim our Mollie.”