In late April, near my home in Tampa, Florida, a Guatemalan woman and her four-year-old daughter were brutally murdered with a knife and shovel by the woman’s boyfriend. The alleged killer, described by the press as “a man from Florida”, apparently killed his girlfriend because she arrived home late after an outing with friends.
It was to be expected that CNN, NPR, the New York Times and other prominent media outlets would cover this story. One could also assume that progressive lawmakers and groups that claim to care about women, immigrants, and domestic violence would highlight the case, condemn the horrific attack, and demand action to protect women. These are reasonable assumptions, but they don’t apply here.
Instead, this story has largely been restricted to right-wing outlets. The reason? The accused, Angel Gabriel Cuz Choc, came illegally from Guatemala to the United States in September 2023. In his country, he was wanted for murdering two other people, according to the Border Patrol from the USA.
These facts explain why only four national news outlets covered the story: Newsweek, People, Huffington Post and CBS News. None admitted that Cuz Choc had entered the country illegally, or provided an update when news broke that he was wanted for two other murders in Guatemala. In its opening sentence, HuffPo derisively referred to Cuz Choc as a “Florida man.”
Mainstream and left-leaning media outlets ignore, downplay, or outright lie about cases like this to preserve the narrative that all illegal immigrants are innocent, “fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries.” But what about those, apparently like Cuz Choc, who flee because they have committed violence in their countries and plan to commit more crimes here?
Occasionally, crime stories involving illegal immigrants become too big for the media to ignore, such as the case of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student kidnapped and murdered in February, allegedly by another recently arrived illegal immigrant with a criminal record. When forced to cover these incidents, corporate media outlets often cite misleading academic studies claiming that migrants commit fewer crimes than Americans. Many of these studies are false; some include legal migrants (such as IT professionals from India) rather than focusing on illegal ones, and all use unreliable data, as police in most states do not track the immigration status of offenders.
The press rarely questions the president and other senior officials responsible for our largely open border to defend the policies that produced these preventable crimes. Joe Biden was forced to address Riley’s murder only because Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted him during his State of the Union address. Biden got her first name wrong, calling her Lincoln, and enraged his base by referring to her alleged killer, accurately, as an “illegal”. He quickly changed the subject, saying, “But how many thousands of people are being killed by legal people?” as if that comforted Riley’s family.
Unlike Laken Riley, Cuz Choc’s alleged victims, Amalia Coc Choc De Pec, 36, and her four-year-old daughter, Estrella, will not become household names. Progressives, who often highlight the unequal treatment of white and non-white victims, don’t have much to say about this disparity. Indeed, left-wing elites and their allies in the media have proven time and time again that they don’t care about minorities killed by illegal immigrants. The press showed no interest in the case of Ariana Funes-Diaz, a 14-year-old girl who, in 2019, was stripped naked, beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed to death with a machete by two teenage members of the MS-13 gang who had criminal records. Nor were they interested in the five Latino victims, three of them women, killed in 2023 by Francisco Oropesa, an illegal immigrant with five previous deportations.
Cuz Choc says he came to the US illegally, with the help of a coyote. We don’t know if he was a “fugitive” (a foreigner who entered illegally and went undetected) or if he was allowed into the country. Given the press’ lack of interest in the case, we may never know.
I have traveled to 80 countries and met many more good people than bad in the developing world. But migrant advocates are foolish to think there are no consequences to importing large numbers of migrant offenders from places that do not respect women’s rights.
This attitude was recently exhibited by a naive but entertaining English YouTuber named Benjamin Rich, whose channel, Bald and Bankrupt, has over 4 million subscribers. A few months ago, Rich produced a series of viral videos in which he traveled from Mexico to our border with migrants hoping to enter the country, repeatedly emphasizing along the way that they were great people we should welcome with open arms. Like other good progressives, he never mentioned the possibility that among the good people there were pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and ordinary men who hold their home countries’ retrograde beliefs about women.
If we want to protect women like Laken Riley and Amalia Coc Choc De Pec, we must restrict the immigration of men from countries that mandate female subservience, or practice female circumcision, arranged child marriages, and polygamy. That won’t happen, of course, because the left-leaning media and activist organizations that claim to care about immigrants and women actually care about promoting their progressive political agendas. For these groups, women like Amalia Choc de Pec and her daughter may well be collateral damage – victims whose killers were members of a preferred tribe.
Dave Seminara is a writer, former diplomat and author of Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed & the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth.
©2024 City Journal. Published with permission. Original in English: Nothing to See Here.
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