Out Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had no time for Donald Trump claiming to care about violence against women this week. During a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Wednesday, Trump joined conservatives around the country in exploiting the death of 25-year-old Grand Rapids resident Ruby Garcia to push an anti-immigration agenda.
Garcia was killed by her boyfriend, who happened to be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Right-wing politicians have since used the murder to perpetuate the idea that an overwhelming number of immigrants are dangerous criminals.
Trump hadn’t planned on visiting Grand Rapids until the Garcia controversy exploded. A press release announcing the event reportedly said Trump would be speaking about “Biden’s border bloodbath.” Ahead of his speech, Nessel posted a video destroying his ability to claim he genuinely cares about protecting women.
She started by accusing him of coming to Grand Rapids to “clout chase” off of Garcia’s murder before listing the numerous ways he has made the country less safe for women at risk of domestic violence.
“In Michigan, we have over 100 domestic homicides per year,” she said, “and Donald Trump’s policies have only contributed to an escalation in the number of domestic violence cases and the lethality of those incidents.”
“Donald Trump didn’t care about domestic violence when he was the first president to allow the Violence Against Women Act to expire when he was president,” she continued, adding that he also didn’t care about domestic violence when he “literally changed the definition of domestic violence and sexual assault to limit the number of people who could be eligible for services from the federal government.”
She also called him out for appointing extremist judges to the federal courts “who have stricken down laws which kept deadly firearms out of the hands of domestic abusers who threatened to kill their partners,” as well as for celebrating when his Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, “ensuring that women who were raped or impregnated by domestic abusers had to carry those pregnancies to term, share custody with their abusers, and sometimes die because of it.”
“And Donald Trump sure as hell doesn’t care about the life or death of Ruby Garcia,” she declared. “Domestic violence victims can’t survive another Trump presidency.”
Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, expressed anger that Trump lied about speaking to her family and that her sister’s death has been turned into a right-wing rallying cry.
“It’s always been about illegal immigrants,” she told Wood TV. “Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”
“The focus should be on my sister right now, who she was in life. I want people to remember who she was in life.”
In his Grand Rapids speech, Trump falsely claimed he spoke with Garcia’s family. “They said she had just the most contagious laughter and when she walked into a room, she lit up that room, and I’ve heard that from so many people,” he told the audience, using words almost directly lifted from Garcia’s death notice, as Meidas Touch pointed out.
Mavi Garcia has since made it clear that Trump lied and has never spoken to their family, nor has anyone from his campaign. Trump also reportedly misstated that Garcia was 17 years old after first correctly saying her age.
Trump also directly accused President Joe Biden for Garcia’s killing, alleging Trump’s administration deported the perpetrator, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, and “crooked Joe Biden took him back and let him back in and he viciously killed Ruby.”
But the Associated Press reports that officials have no idea whether Ortiz-Vite reentered the country during Trump’s or Biden’s presidency after initially being deported after a drunk driving arrest in September 2020.
The AP also pointed out that many studies have found immigrants are less likely than American-born citizens to commit violent crimes.
