NYT Podcast Downplays Rise In Murders Caused By Illegal Immigrants Following Laken Riley Trial

“The Daily,” a podcast platformed by The New York Times, downplayed the spike in murders caused by illegal immigrants following the conviction of 22-year-old Laken Riley’s murderer.

Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard convicted Jose Ibarra, an illegal migrant from Venezuela, of all ten counts at the conclusion of the trial and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. The Times’ Atlanta bureau chief Rick Rojas said that Riley’s murder outside of the University of Georgia’s campus is “not reflective” of illegal immigrants’ intentions and suggested that Republicans are highlighting this murder to spew their anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“This is very clearly an aberration. What Jose Ibarra is accused of doing is no way reflective of the intentions or the actions of the vast majority of the people who are undocumented and who enter the United States,” Rojas said. “Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. That this is a population that is doing everything they can to avoid detection, to keep their head down, their intention is not to come here and sow unrest and perpetrate violence, it’s really to get away from something else and seek economic opportunity. And so, while this case is very much real, it’s not necessarily an indictment of undocumented people more broadly. But President Trump and other conservatives have highlighted this case because it so neatly makes the point that they want to make even if the evidence more broadly doesn’t bear this out.”

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Several outlets such as The Washington Post