In late April, near my home in Tampa, a woman from Guatemala and her four-year-old daughter were brutally killed with a knife and a shovel by the woman’s live-in boyfriend.
The alleged killer, described in the press as “a Florida man,” apparently killed his girlfriend because she returned home late from an outing with friends.
You would think that CNN, NPR, The New York Times and other prominent media outlets might cover this story. You would also assume that progressive legislators and groups that purport to care about women, immigrants and domestic violence would highlight the case, condemn the horrific attack and demand action to protect women.
Those are reasonable assumptions, but they don’t apply here.
Instead, this story has been mostly cabined to right-leaning media.
The reason? The accused killer, Angel Gabriel Cuz Choc, came to the United States illegally in September 2023 from Guatemala, where he was wanted for murdering two other people, according to US Border Patrol.
Those 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 followed up when news broke that he was wanted for two other murders in Guatemala. In its opening sentence, HuffPo ridiculously referred to Cuz Choc as a “Florida man.”
Left-wing and mainstream outlets ignore, downplay or outright lie about these types of stories to preserve the narrative that illegal immigrants are all innocent strivers, “fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries.”
But what about those, apparently like Cuz Choc, who flee because they committed violence in their home countries and plan to commit more crimes here?
Occasionally, crime stories involving illegal immigrants become too big for the media to ignore, like 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 they are forced to cover such incidents, the corporate media often cite misleading academic studies asserting that migrants commit fewer crimes than Americans.
These studies are often bogus; some include legal migrants (such as IT professionals from India), instead of focusing on illegals, and all use unreliable data, since police in most states don’t track offenders’ immigration status.
The press rarely asks the president and other high-ranking officials responsible for our effectively open border to defend the policies that produced these preventable crimes.
President Biden was forced to address the Riley murder only because Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled him during his State of the Union address.
Biden got her first name wrong, calling her Lincoln, and infuriated his base by referring to her suspected killer, accurately, as an “illegal.” He quickly pivoted to say, “But how many of thousands of people are being killed by legals?” as if that would comfort Riley’s family.
Unlike Laken Riley, Cuz Choc’s alleged victims, Amalia Coc Choc De Pec, 36, and her four-year-old daughter, Estrella, won’t become household names.
Progressives, who otherwise often note the unequal treatment afforded white and nonwhite victims, haven’t had much to say about this disparity.
Indeed, left-wing elites and their media allies have proved repeatedly that they don’t care about minorities killed by illegal immigrants.
The press were uninterested in the case of Ariana Funes-Diaz, a 14-year-old girl who, in 2019, was stripped, beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed to death with a machete by a pair of teenage MS-13 gang members with criminal records.
Neither were they interested in the five Latino victims, three female, killed in 2023 by Francisco Oropesa, an illegal immigrant with five previous deportations.
I’ve traveled to 80 countries and have met many more good people than bad ones in the developing world.
But migrant advocates are foolish to think that we can import without consequence large numbers of lawbreaking migrants from places that don’t respect women’s rights.
If we want to protect women like Laken Riley and Amalia Coc Choc De Pec, we should restrict male immigration from countries that compel female subservience, or practice female circumcisions, child-bride arranged marriages or polygamy.
This won’t happen, of course, because the media and left-wing activist shops that claim to care about immigrants and women really care about advancing progressive policy agendas.
To those groups, women like Amalia Choc de Pec and her daughter may as 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 and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth.” From City Journal.
