Can politicians here resist using a horrible crime for political gain?
We’re about to find out.
On Thursday, 26-year-old Cory B. Alvarez was arraigned for raping a 15-year-old girl in the Rockland hotel where each of their families had been given emergency shelter.
The crime of which Alvarez — recently arrived in this country — is accused is the stuff of nightmares: His alleged victim, a recent immigrant from Haiti, told police Alvarez raped her when she went to his room for help with her iPad. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.
If Alvarez had been born here, if he and his alleged victim both lived in rentals in Rockland, instead of in a state-funded shelter, this would be the story of a sickening crime and nothing more — if it became a story at all.
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But critics of this country’s immigration policies, and of the way Massachusetts is handling an influx of new arrivals, have turned it into something bigger: An indictment of US border policy, of the decades-old right to shelter law in this state, and of immigrants themselves.
So far, it is heartening to report, local reaction has been less rabid than what we’ve seen nationally.
In a statement, David DeCoste, a Norwell Republican, said “The Commonwealth has failed this young girl.” GOP chair Amy Carnevale said “the influx of additional migrants may exacerbate the likelihood of such distressing occurrences,” and that the alleged rape called out for amending the right to shelter law, which mandates that the state provide a roof over the heads of homeless families that meet certain conditions.
From what we know so far, none of these assertions make sense. The Commonwealth did two background checks on Alvarez and found nothing. Officials would have had to be psychic to foresee this alleged crime. And though there may be arguments for revisiting the right to shelter law, the fact that this crime was allegedly committed by one person among the thousands of families in shelters sure isn’t one of them.
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This one awful assault is about this one awful assault: It’s not an indictment of an entire system, or, more importantly, of an entire swath of humanity.
But of course that hasn’t prevented national GOP types from seizing on the rape allegation to fuel hysteria about open borders, migrant crime waves and white people being replaced by Black and brown folks streaming over the border, “poisoning the blood of our country,” as GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump put it.
Among them, MAGA troll Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to the Rockland case by tweeting at Democrats: “How many innocent Americans have to be murdered, raped, or attacked before you are willing to take our border security seriously?”
Greene and her fellow-travelers are supposedly apoplectic about the border, but they refuse to vote on bipartisan legislation that would impose stricter controls there than we’ve seen in decades, because Trump doesn’t want to give Biden a win before November. And while they’re full of compassion for rape victims, they are also determined to force those victims to give birth to their rapists’ babies if they become pregnant.
If Greene and the others have their way, the Rockland rape will become this week’s Laken Riley crusade. Riley, a white nursing student in Georgia, was murdered on February 22, allegedly by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant. Republicans have seized on the horrific killing because it fits their narrative of a migrant crime wave, which they are clearly hoping will swing voters their way come November.
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Trump recently met with Riley’s family before a rally in Georgia, where he decried “the deadly invasion that stole precious Laken’s beautiful American life.” He posed with the family, grinning far too widely as he held a picture of the dead girl he had autographed with a sharpie.
This shouldn’t even need to be said, but in fact, migrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, and studies show that crime has dropped in this country as immigration has increased.
More importantly, no one suggests that all white people are criminals when one of them rapes or murders. Doing so when the person who does it is Venezuelan or Haitian is straight-up racism.
Trump and his cult are going to do what they do when it comes to the Rockland case. That doesn’t mean people in this state have to join in.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her @GlobeAbraham.