“My father taught me many things here – he taught me in this room. He taught me – keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
–Michael Corleone, Godfather II
Every murder is a tragedy, but some murders are more tragic than others. To explain, I don’t want to be murdered. It sounds bad. But it would be unimaginably worse if any of my children were murdered, so much worse that I would gladly take their place and all parents would. The public, media, and politicians care more or less based on who the victim is. Young women like Mollie Tibbets or Kate Steinle elicit the most sympathy because they did nothing wrong, were robbed of decades of life by complete strangers, and were attractive. But what about other cases, like those of Irma Vaquedano and her boyfriend Danny Rodriguez?
Rodriguez decapitated Vaquedano in Seattle in 2019. The police arrived and killed Rodriguez, a likely illegal immigrant, when he picked up the knife again. The standoff and shooting are on camera.[i] Rodriguez’s brutal crime didn’t make the national news, wasn’t used by politicians to argue that immigrants are coming to kill you, and it escaped almost all public notice. Why? His victim, Irma Vaquedano, wasn’t as sympathetic or worthy in the minds of politicians, the media, or the public. As a result, most people thought her death was less tragic and not worth paying attention to. This is a sad fact, but it shows the larger point that the sympathetic worthiness of the victims matters and can drive a political or media frenzy over a murder. Why didn’t the country care about Vaquedano’s heinous murder? She was an illegal immigrant.
The media, the public, and political judgment aren’t fair, and evolutionary psychologists could probably cook up a just-so story about why these cases garner less attention, but that doesn’t reduce the tragedy or viciousness of the crimes, nor does it determine which punishment Rodriguez deserves had he lived. Vaquedano was murdered and that’s it. But this case tells us a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to crime and immigration. It tells us when others care about the crime – and they care most when the victim is a young adult or teenager, female, physically attractive, a good person who avoids trouble, and a native-born American. Not all victims are created equal.
Illegal Immigrant Criminals Mostly Victimize Other Illegal Immigrants
A friend of mine used to be a prosecutor in Fairfax County, Virginia. For those who don’t know, Fairfax County has had an on-again, off-again problem with a gang called MS-13. Also known as Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13 is a brutal transnational criminal gang started by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s. The US government deported many of them to El Salvador in the middle of a civil war where they took over large swaths of the country. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele recently turned a peculiar mark of MS-13 gang membership – their insane and ubiquitous facial and body tattoos – against the gang by imprisoning everybody in El Salvador with a tattoo. The policy is so well enforced that even non-Hispanic Americans are warned not to visit if they’re inked up.
Between the time that the U.S. deported the first MS-13 gang member to El Salvador and Bukele made being tatted up a crime, many returned to the United States to set up shop. One of their franchise locations was in Fairfax County, Virginia, where my friend and I live.
You can’t go long watching the local news or scanning the newspapers without reading about MS-13 or a crime committed by one of its members in the DC area. But my friend had trouble getting convictions, even for heinous crimes where MS-13 guilt really wasn’t in question. In my innocent, WASPy way, I assumed he was having trouble getting a conviction because the gang members were threatening jurors, intimidating their families, or otherwise harming those responsible for the convictions of their comrades – like a storyline from Law and Order.
His explanation was nothing so bad, but was far more interesting. “Gang members mostly murder other gang members,” my friend said. “When jurors see who the victims is, they think ‘well, I guess that evens out,’ and they’re reluctant to convict a gang member who took out the trash . . . but when a gang member kills a normal person, jurors charge the electric chair.”
Juror behavior uncovers a fact we all know to be true, even though we don’t like mentioning it: Some victims deserve more sympathy and protection than others. Jurors sympathize with the innocent bystander gunned down in a gang war, but not so much with a mobster, another gang member, or their girlfriends who are murdered in the process. Gang bangers choose to join the gang when they don’t have to, so whatever bad things happen to them are deserved.
That response is somewhat reassuring because it means we aren’t surrounded by sociopaths, but it also means that some victims matter more than others, and some people are more worthy of protection. And the impulse makes sense – if somebody isn’t going to take the obvious precautions to prevent being murdered, why should we care as much about their fate as we would care about the fate of somebody who didn’t join a gang or date a mobster?
Illegal immigrant victims of crimes committed by other illegal immigrants also don’t get much sympathy. Most of them aren’t even criminals because being unlawfully present in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. Even so, breaking immigration laws is about as victimless an offense as you can get. Jaywalking produces more victims because it sometimes slows down traffic, which is an unacceptably anti-social behavior that should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Do you hear that climate ShutDownDC? I’m not saying it’s proper to run over climate protesters who block traffic but I also didn’t get the license plate, officer.
When people even hear about a crime committed by an illegal immigrant against another illegal immigrant, they sometimes think, “the victim shouldn’t have been here anyway” or “live in the black market, die in the black market.” More often, they just shrug their shoulders and read about Taylor Swift or the Epstein Files. In March 2021, an SUV accident in California killed 13 people near the border and the early news reports were that illegal immigrants were involved. Social media went insane for a few hours before everyone realized the fatalities were illegal immigrants, not native-born Americans.[ii] The response after that was just crickets.
Florencio Felix Barron was deported in 2016 after being convicted of child abuse when he inappropriately touched a child at an elementary school in Austin, Texas.[iii] He eventually reentered the United States illegally and tracked down his common-law wife, Veneranda Martinez-Gutierrez, who was also the mother of his three children. Barron stalked and harassed her for months, and Veneranda called the police several times with no effect. Everything’s bigger in Texas, even police indifference.
Weeks before Christmas in 2019, Barron tracked Veneranda down in the parking lot of a Valero Gas Station in Austin and murdered her in front of their children before blowing his own brains out on the spot.[iv] “She was loved by everyone,” said Veneranda’s cousin Abelina Martinez.[v] Hundreds of people honored her death, confirming Martinez’s judgment. Her brutal murder made the local news, but didn’t travel beyond the Hill Country because she was also an illegal immigrant. Imagine how different it would be if Veneranda were an attractive native-born American woman.
Traditional and social media are good ways to judge whether the public thinks a victim is worthy of sympathy and protection. The Republican National Committee (RNC) tweeted many times about Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered by an illegal immigrant in Georgia in 2024. Pulled at random, one of the RNC’s tweets earned over 2000 likes and more than 600 retweets.[vi]
Within hours of the arrest of Riley’s illegal immigrant murderer, a Fox News anchor was drawing comparisons between Riley and Kate Steinle, another woman shot to death by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco in 2015. Steinle’s killing and the subsequent trial garnered enormous political attention from Trump during his first run for president and during his first administration. Steinle’s mother, Liz Sullivan, told the San Francisco Chronicle that she and her family felt politically exploited.[vii] “For Donald Trump,” Sullivan said, “we were just what he needed—beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a million times.”[viii]
Riley’s murder dominated the news in a similar way in 2024. President Joe Biden mentioned Riley’s murder in his 2024 State of the Union Address, politicians ran commercials in Georgia about the murder, and others put up billboards about it.[ix] There was even an act of Congress named after her.[x] After the election, Riley was a sympathetic victim murdered by an illegal immigrant.
Others killed by illegal immigrants aren’t so sympathetic. A month after the RNC tweeted about Riley’s murder, they also tweeted about an illegal immigrant who stabbed another illegal immigrant to death, and it earned just 112 likes and 71 retweets – a fraction of the attention.[xi] From homicide to rape and everything in between, people just don’t care as much when the victim is an illegal immigrant – even when an illegal immigrant is the criminal.[xii]
But the unworthy and unsympathetic victim trope doesn’t always hold for illegal immigrants, sometimes for bizarre reasons. Mexican illegal immigrant Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres murdered five of his neighbors on April 28, 2023, after they asked Perez-Torres to stop shooting his rifle in the backyard because it was waking up their baby.[xiii] I’m a gun nut like most red-blooded libertarian men, but target practice in a neighborhood is as worrying as someone who says, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Minutes later, Perez-Torres shot five people at his neighbor’s house, including a 9-year-old boy.[xiv] Four of Perez-Torres’ victims were likely illegal immigrants from Honduras.[xv] Texas Governor Greg Abbot linked the mass murder to illegal immigration when he tweeted, “I’ve announced a $50K reward for info on the criminal who killed 5 illegal immigrants Friday. Also directed #OperationLoneStar to be on the lookout.”[xvi]
This horrible mass murder was big news for days, and it didn’t abate after it was known that most of the victims were probably illegal immigrants, too. If anything, the news intensified because Governor Abbot’s tweet focused on the immigration status of the killer and the victims and then referenced Operation Lone Star – his state-level operation to enforce immigration laws in Texas.[xvii] Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said, “It’s below the dignity of the governor to impugn the victims of a mass shooting about their legal status. All of the victims are Latino and so is the suspected gunman. This is a tragedy that involves another serial killing and a weapon for war that was used in the killing. That’s the issue, not the legal status of the victims.”[xviii] The real mystery here is why Garcia thinks governors have dignity.
Regardless, the mass murder of four illegal immigrants by another illegal immigrant is the exception to the trend above. In at least one case, illegal immigrants really are viewed as sympathetic victims who are worthy of protection.
We know who the media and the public think are unsympathetic and unworthy victims – illegal immigrants (most of the time) and people who voluntarily interact with criminals. Who are the sympathetic ones worthy of protection? American-born women (and some men) who are young, attractive, and did everything right to avoid trouble. They stayed away from crime-prone areas, had hardworking and ambitious friends, didn’t date crazy men in gangs, had loving families, and had their entire lives ahead of them. They were just the victims of a random attack by a total stranger – like being struck by lightning or being struck down by E. coli. Those are the victims who deserve most of our sympathy and who are worthy of additional protection. They are the ones that immigrants are coming to kill. Or are they?
Your Friends, Families, and Neighbors Are Coming to Kill You
The homicide conviction rates from the previous chapter are hiding an important fact that should make you feel even less threatened by immigrants. People usually kill people they know – like their friends, family members, neighbors, and coworkers. It doesn’t seem like it, but that should make you feel better. If you’re a native-born American, it should relax you if you fear immigrant crime, but it probably shouldn’t if you have many crazy young men in your life.
Immigrants are mostly friends with other immigrants, are related to other immigrants, are more likely to have immigrant neighbors, date other immigrants, and work with more immigrants than native-born Americans. Data on crime victimization in the US shows that immigrants are less likely to be victims because they are also less likely to be criminals in the first place.[xix] This is great news for those of you who are native-born Americans and worried about how immigrants are coming to kill you, but bad news because that means you’re probably friends with, related to, live next to, and work with more native-born Americans – who are much more likely to murder you.
National crime data from 2022 is typical of how murderers and their victims tend to know each other before the crime. According to the data, 79 percent of murder victims knew their murderers where the prior relationship was known by the police.[xx] Almost half of those pre-existing relationships were familial or romantic, the other half were neighbors, friends, acquaintances, employers or employees, or had a different relationship altogether. There’s no mystery here; people often murder those they know after an argument, another squabble, or in the commission of another crime. These murders are the most tragic when they’re in the same family.
Christine Banfield and her husband, Brendan Banfield, hired a Brazilian au pair named Juliana Peres Magalhães to help care for the couple’s four-year-old daughter. Following the storyline of a bad murder mystery, Brendan and Juliana then had an affair and likely conspired to murder Christine and another man who would be the patsy. The partners in crime set up a fake profile for Christine on a sex fetish website and tricked a local man named Joseph Ryan to come over to their house one morning as part of a rape fantasy while Brendan was supposedly at work and Juliana took the daughter to the zoo. Brandan’s plan was to burst in, kill Ryan and Christine, and make it look like Ryan had murdered her before her valiant husband tried to save her.[xxi]
Detectives suspected foul play but became convinced when Juliana moved into the master bedroom with Brendan and the four-year-old girl started calling her “mommy.” Juliana pled guilty to manslaughter and Brendan is being tried for murder. It’s no Hallmark ending, but there may at least be some justice. Brazil really wasn’t sending its best migrants in the case of Juliana, but Brendan seems to have instigated this vicious crime against his own family.
Christine, Brendan, and Juliana all knew each other. If they didn’t, Christine would never have been murdered, but Christine didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t choose to marry a gangster or criminal. His job as an IRS agent is the only evidence that Brendan was a psychopathic killer before he was arrested for murder. On the other hand, the killer who targets a stranger or kills them while committing another crime is rare by comparison and probably more frightening because you can’t do as much to protect yourself from randomness. You can do well to avoid downtown or stop taking the metro, but sometimes downtown doesn’t want to avoid you, and your train arrives early. Danny Rodriguez was Irma Vaquedano’s boyfriend until he murdered her. In the public’s eye, she didn’t do enough to avoid him. This should make you feel less afraid if you wisely choose whom you want to date, be friends with, work with, and live next to. But it should probably make you feel less safe if you’re friends with scumbags.[1]
The Most Unsympathetic Criminals and the Most Sympathetic Victims
“Murderers aren’t sympathetic people” is a relatively uncontroversial statement for this post, but some murderers are less sympathetic than others. The same goes for their victims. Robert Krentz was murdered on his Arizona ranch in 2010, prompting the state legislature to pass the harshest illegal immigration enforcement law up to that time. Nobody was brought to justice for Krentz’s murder, but reasonable people argue it was likely an illegal immigrant, a drug smuggler, or an illegal immigrant drug smuggler working for a cartel.
Not only was Krentz a sympathetic victim because he was an elderly rancher – he warned about the problems of illegal immigration and tried to help migrants who ended up on his property – but he was possibly and even likely murdered by drug cartels, who are some of the most brutal criminals in the world today. As unsympathetic as murderous drug smugglers are, there is a class of criminals even more despicable: cannibals.
Prominent online right-wing commentators went wild in 2024 over claims that the Biden administration was flying Haitian cannibal gangs into the interior of the United States from the border.[xxii] To eat Americans. Because normal murder wasn’t scary enough, Americans also had to fear immigrant criminals who were coming over the border to eat them. There is not a single case of a Haitian cannibal gang operating in the United States. The only evidence are social media posts about cannibals in Haiti, but no actual stories or pictures of such.[xxiii] One prominent rumor is that former police officer and gang leader Jimmy Cherizier, also known as Barbecue, earned his nickname by cooking people alive and eating them.[xxiv] Silly rumor mill, he only earned the nickname by burning people alive (which he denies), not eating.[xxv] Some immigrants are coming here to serve you dinner, not to serve you for dinner.
The Haitian cannibal gang rumor turned out to be untrue, but another rumor spread about Haitians eating cats and dogs – some of the most sympathetic victims in modern American society. Pets are so beloved in the United States that killing them usually ends careers and can result in jail time. Former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem was a leading contender to be selected by Trump to be his vice president, but her ambition unraveled when her 2024 book, No Going Back, included a story of how she killed a pet dog.[xxvi] She described the story over several pages, and, remarkably, her dog wasn’t the only domestic animal she admitted to killing in that season. She said, “a better politician . . . wouldn’t tell the story here.”[xxvii] That’s certainly true, as the Trump campaign reacted by not considering her for the vice presidential slot after that and instead put her in charge of enforcing immigration laws.
The rumor of Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs started in Springfield, Ohio, with a speculative Facebook post that “just exploded,” according to its author Erika Lee.[xxviii] She wrote that her neighbor’s cat went missing and that Haitians were to blame. “I didn’t mean [it] to happen,” Lee said when the post went viral – but happen it did.[xxix] Friends don’t let friends shitpost.
Online nativists ran with the story. Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Malaysian internet personality, fanned the rumors by posting videos of a black American from Canton, Ohio, who was arrested for killing and potentially eating a cat.[xxx] Canton is a 172-mile drive away from Springfield, but we can’t expect a click farmer from Malaysia to know that. There was then a picture of a black native-born American man carrying dead geese in Columbus, another Ohio town, and this was supposedly further evidence of Haitians in Springfield killing animals. Not only was the man not Haitian, he picked up the geese after they were hit and killed by a car.[xxxi]
Presidential candidate Trump then ran with the rumor during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris in September 2024 when he said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”[xxxii] His quotes were even turned into viral online music videos.[xxxiii] Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, picked in part because he didn’t admit to killing pets in his famous memoir Hilly Billy Elegy, even fell for the hoax by highlighting that people in the town “have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”[xxxiv] After falling for it, Vance claimed he didn’t fall for it and that he was really just lying the entire time. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention,” Vance said to CNN, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The Springfield police department said that it has received no reports of missing pets being eaten.[xxxv] Conservative activist Christopher Rufo asked for evidence and offered a $5,000 reward – but instead received video of chickens on the grill in an apartment complex where African immigrants lived a few towns over. Africans aren’t Haitians, chickens aren’t cats, and Dayton isn’t Springfield, but otherwise his evidence was spot on.[xxxvi] The made-up Haitian cannibal gang story wasn’t enough, so the nativist rumor mill created stories of rampant, catastrophic cat consumption to make Haitian migrants seem evil. There was no evidence of Haitians doing this in Florida, where almost all Haitian immigrants live, but you can’t expect online nativists and the conservative activists who cover for them to make sense. The more likely reason is that Florida wasn’t a swing state and didn’t even border one in 2024.
If Haitian immigrants are so bad, why do so many people have to make up fake stories about them? Real stories should abound, but there’s more evidence that heads of conservative DC think tanks and Republican politicians kill more pets than Haitian immigrants.[xxxvii] That should tell you that Haitian migrants aren’t coming to eat you or your furry friends.
What’s the Takeaway?
We hear all the time that the media is biased. Conservatives complain about liberal bias, and liberals (hilariously) complain about conservative bias. But narrative bias transcends all others. Humans evolved to like narratives. Sitting around the campfire listening to a story told by Ugg about how he killed the woolly mammoth shares information and gives Ugg more status in his tribe. It makes him seem cooler, stronger, and better than others and more worthy of respect, admiration, the attention of women, and more food. And we all know how much humans like to feel better than others. It’s the main reason why I write (publishers don’t actually pay most writers well). But the deeper lesson here is the narrative bias.
Narratives require a good guy, a bad guy, and a story involving the two. The characters can be nuanced, and the bad guy doesn’t have to be a human but can be an animal or some other force. Heck, the good guys don’t even have to be particularly good. Narratives are fun, but you can’t explain how the world works with narratives because it’s too big and complicated. Few aspects of the modern world have a single protagonist, antagonist, or conflict that fits neatly into a story. Most of the big things that happen are of people reacting to unseen and abstract forces caused by other people whom they don’t know, but the stories are what capture our imagination and make the world come alive.
I stared at regression tables, empirical papers, legal analyses, and mathematical models to figure out what caused the 2008 financial crisis. Michael Lewis wrote a book about some short sellers that became a major movie called The Big Short – you may have heard of it.[xxxviii] The Big Short probably explained the financial crisis to more people than have ever been convinced by the findings of all empirical economics papers over the history of the world because it’s a very entertaining story. It’s wrong, and Lewis’s conclusions were ludicrous, but it’s an excellent story.
We all exploit narrative bias. I’m using narrative bias in this substack to make it more readable. The elderly woman in Arizona who asked me “what do they have to hide?” was falling for a form of narrative bias by assuming there were good guys, who were the Border Patrol or a personified United States more generally that includes herself, and the bad guys who were illegal immigrants breaking those laws. They must have evil motives.
If I thought econometrics and economic models were convincing, I’d update my first book instead of writing these posts.[xxxix] But don’t confuse narratives with big facts or models of the world. Reporters write news stories – they’re called stories, after all – because that’s what people want to read. Stories are how reporters think because they’re humans too; it’s how we evolved to think, make sense of the world, and partly to judge status. That may have worked well enough in your tribe 50,000 years ago when you all were stuck on the Savannah but it’s a poor way of reasoning today. A story is just a story.
The flippant response of academics to scientific-sounding explanations that aren’t formally modeled or empirically tested is to label them “just-so stories.” Convenient stories that are simple explanations for complex events can be correct, but they’re usually not. I criticized academics earlier for refusing to answer other people’s questions, but they’re correct that the world is complex and it’s difficult to figure out how it works. Prices at the supermarket don’t rise because farmers are greedy any more than planes sometimes crash because gravity pulls harder, but both are easier stories to tell than “excessive money creation by the Federal Reserve and aggregate demand from fiscal stimulus pushed up prices across the board.” That just doesn’t tickle our prefrontal cortexes in the same way.
Successful political propagandists and writers usually try to pick out an enemy and a victim, weaving them together in a story where specific individuals do things that others respond to. “You see,” they begin, “those evil bankers, who are mostly foreign, control the Fed and tell it to print money as part of their Globalist plot to rob you, the middle class.” Simple, entertaining, and idiotic.
Criminals and victims who are sympathetic or very unsympathetic are ripe for narrative bias. We can’t look away. But the stories throughout this substack and others don’t prove any statistical fact; you can’t compare anecdotes and reach an intelligent conclusion. They don’t help you understand the world because it’s a big and complicated place. You should use narratives to understand the big picture statistical facts – don’t memorize the numbers – but just know that legal and illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. That’s the fact that matters. The stories are the sugar that helps the statistical medicine go down. Taste the sugar, plug your nose, and swallow.
[1] People who hang out with scumbags don’t read many substacks, so you should be fine… statistically speaking.
[i] Chris Dyer, “Police release footage of the moment an agitated knife-wielding suspect is shot dead by cops after ‘murdering his girlfriend by beheading her’ in a Seattle apartment, ” Daily Mail, February 18, 2019.
[ii] Miriam Jordan and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “S.U.V. Packed With 25 Passengers Crashes Near California Border, Killing 13,” The New York Times, March 2, 2021.
[iii] Gabriela Vida, “Memorial service honors woman killed by father of her children,” CBS Austin, December 12, 2019.
[iv] CBS Austin, “Police: Mother died protecting her children in murder-suicide,” CBS Austin, December 8, 2019.
[v] Gabriela Vida, “Memorial service honors woman killed by father of her children,” CBS Austin, December 12, 2019.
[vi] RNC Research (@RNCResearch), “Murder of Laken Riley by Illegal Alien,” X post, March 6, 2024, 9:34 p.m.
[vii] C.W. Nevius, “Steinle’s parents: ‘no room for angry’,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2015; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Will Laken Riley’s Murder Tip Georgia?” The New Yorker, October 29, 2024.
[viii] C.W. Nevius, “Steinle’s parents: ‘no room for angry’,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2015.
[ix] Sam Gringlas, “How a Georgia nursing student’s killing reached Biden’s State of the Union,” NPR, March 8, 2024; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Will Laken Riley’s Murder Tip Georgia?” The New Yorker, October 29, 2024.
[x] Laken Riley Act, US Senate, 119th Cong., 1st sess., January 29, 2025.
[xi] RNC Research (@RNCResearch), “BIDEN MIGRANT CRIME,” X post, April 19, 2024, 2:51 p.m.
[xii] Jennie Taer, “US soldier shoots migrant during border-crosser stabbing near El Paso as rising violence continues,” New York Post, April 15, 2024; Liam Griffin, “Afghan Refugee Convicted Of Sexually Assaulting 3-Year-Old Girl At Quantico,” Patch, January 24, 2022; Illegal Alien Crimes (@ImmigrantCrimes), “Hillsborough County, FL: Yesterday, Angel Gabriel Cruz-Choc was arrested for a double murder in the stabbing death of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter,” X post, April 26, 2024, 3:03 p.m; Brandon Truitt, “Migrant charged with raping teen at Rockland hotel being used as shelter,” CBS News, March 14, 2024; Andrew R. Arthur, “Why Was Accused Guatemalan Murderer Loose in Florida?,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2, 2024.
[xiii] Ed Lavandera et al., “Suspect in Texas massacre had been deported 4 times after entering US illegally, ICE source says,” CNN, May 1, 2023.
[xiv] Ed Lavandera et al., “Suspect in Texas massacre had been deported 4 times after entering US illegally, ICE source says,” CNN, May 1, 2023.
[xv] Suzanne Gamboa, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott slammed for calling shooting victims ‘illegal immigrants’,” NBC News, May 1, 2023.
[xvi] Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX), “$50K Reward for Info on the Criminal Who Killed 5 Illegal Immigrants on Friday,” X post, April 30, 2023, 5:15 p.m.
[xvii] Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX), “$50K Reward for Info on the Criminal Who Killed 5 Illegal Immigrants on Friday,” X post, April 30, 2023, 5:15 p.m.
[xviii] Suzanne Gamboa, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott slammed for calling shooting victims ‘illegal immigrants’,” NBC News, May 1, 2023.
[xix] David J. Bier and Julian Salazar, “Immigrants Cut Victimization Rates, Boost Crime Reporting,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no, 1003, August 26, 2025.
[xx] “All Expanded Homicide Offense vs. Victim Demographics,” Crime Data Explorer, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[xxi] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/au-pair-double-homicide-herndon/3981102/; https://www.fox5dc.com/news/virginia-au-pair-murder-trial-alleged-plot-double-homicide-latest;
[xxii] Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacIntyre), “A gentle reminder that the border is open and there is essentially nothing preventing immigrants from bringing this madness here,” X post, March 10, 2024, 10:08 a.m; Paul A. Szypula (@Bubblebathgirl), “CNN Should Visit Cannibalistic Haiti,” X post, March 13, 2024, 8:01 a.m; Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray), “NBC News Smear Campaign against Elon Musk,” X post, March 13, 2024, 7:14 p.m; The Matt Walsh Show (@MattWalshShow), “Haiti Descends Into Chaos As Our Borders Remain Wide Open,” X post, March 11, 2024, 2:34 p.m.
[xxiii] David Ingram, “Elon Musk and right-wing influencers use ‘cannibal’ claims to smear Haitian migrants amid crisis,” NBC News, March 13, 2024.
[xxiv] Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall), “‘tonight, a haitian leader claims the trump administration’s plans could be catastrophic for his country. an interesting contention, as haiti is currently run by a cannibal warlord named barbecue’,” X post, January 26, 2025, 8:01 p.m.
[xxv] “Jimmy Chérizier,” Wikipedia.com, last edited September 2, 2025.
[xxvi] Martin Pengelly, “Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book,” The Guardian, April 26, 2024.
[xxvii] Martin Pengelly, “Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book,” The Guardian, April 26, 2024.
[xxviii] Alicia V. Lozano, “‘It just Exploded’: Springfield Woman Claims She Never Meant to Spark False Rumors about Haitians,” NBC News, September 13, 2024.
[xxix] Alicia V. Lozano, “‘It just Exploded’: Springfield Woman Claims She Never Meant to Spark False Rumors about Haitians,” NBC News, September 13, 2024.
[xxx] Daniel Di Martino (@DanielDiMartino), “I keep seeing people claim that this woman who ate a cat is a Haitian migrant. But this is FALSE,” X post, September 24, 2024, 12:28 a.m.
[xxxi] Andrea Cavallier and James Liddell, “Explanation finally revealed for viral image of man holding geese that fueled bizarre pet-eating claims in Ohio,” The Independent, September 14, 2024.
[xxxii] Odette Yousef, “In parroting a lie about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Trump excites extremists,” NPR, September 24, 2024; Riley Hoffman, “READ: Harris-Trump presidential debate transcript,” ABC News, September 10, 2024; MonoNeon (@MonoNeon), “They’re Eating The Dogs, They’re Eating The Cats. - Donald Trump,” X post, September 11, 2024, 9:29 a.m.
[xxxiii] Emily (@emilylazzell), “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats! TikTok viral Trump song,” X post, September 12, 2024, 4:04 a.m.
[xxxiv] JD Vance (@JDVance), “Haitian Illegal Immigrants Draining Social Services and Generally Causing Chaos All over Springfield, Ohio. Now They’re Eating Our Pets,” X post, September 9, 2024, 10:22 a.m.
[xxxv] Jessica Orozco, “Springfield Police Say No Reports of Pets Stolen, Eaten, after Viral Social Media Post,” Springfield News-Sun, September 9, 2024.
[xxxvi] Nitish Pahwa, “Why the Right-Wing Lie About Migrants Eating Pets Won’t Die,”Slate, September 25, 2024.
[xxxvii] Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Project 2025 Mastermind Allegedly Told Colleagues He Killed a Dog with a Shovel,” The Guardian, September 24, 2024.
[xxxviii] Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); Michael Grunwald. “What ‘The Big Short’ Gets Wrong,” Politico, January 16, 2016; Peter J. Wallison, “Missing the Point: Lessons from The Big Short,” American Enterprise Institute, June 30, 2010; Richard Kovacevich, “The Financial Crisis: Why the Conventional Wisdom Has It All Wrong,” Cato Journal 34, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 541–556.
[xxxix] Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell, Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2020).