Mollie Tibbetts went missing in Iowa. Now her death is at the center of the immigration debate.

Tibbetts’s family released a statement after her death was confirmed, asking to be “allowed the time to process our devastating loss and share our grief in private.”

But when officials said they charged Cristhian Rivera, a 24-year-old Mexican national and farmworker, with first-degree murder, it thrust Tibbetts’s case into the center of the country’s knotted debate over immigration. Authorities identified Rivera as an undocumented immigrant — something his lawyer disputes.

University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts has been found dead, authorities say

Investigators have not said how Tibbetts was killed or what happened in the moments after she disappeared while jogging, but they say that after confessing to her killing Monday, Rivera led police to her body in a field.

President Trump and the White House quickly seized on the tragedy, which continues to shock and confound people in the community. Trump has falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crime. On Wednesday night, he posted a video saying that Tibbetts “is now permanently separated from her family,” language evoking the furor over his administration’s widely criticized policy of separating thousands of migrant children from their families.

“Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color,” Tibbetts’s aunt Billie Jo Calderwood said in a statement.

The suspect’s immigration status

Rivera’s immigration status became a focal point and helped draw a new surge of media attention to the story, which had been in the news as the search for Tibbetts grew. Law enforcement officials and his former employer said Rivera was in the country illegally and used a stolen identification to satisfy a federal background check at the farm where he worked.

• Rivera worked at Yarrabee Farms. In an interview, Dane and Craig Lang said Rivera had worked at the farm for nearly four months. They said that Rivera has a young daughter and that his main job on the farm was cleaning the cattle stalls.

• The farm’s manager, Dane Lang, said in a news conference that Rivera had provided a state-issued photo identification and a Social Security card when he applied for a job nearly four years ago. Those documents were false, Lang said.

• Yarrabee Farms did not use the government’s E-Verify system to vet Rivera, Lang said.

• The farm used a program connected to a Social Security Administration database, which didn’t flag any problems.

• Lang would not disclose the name that Rivera used to get a job.

• Rivera’s attorney, Allan M. Richards, said Wednesday in a motion asking for a gag order that Rivera was in the country legally, adding that his employer had verified Rivera’s status.

• Richards provided no evidence to back up the assertion in the motion and could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Lang family has been getting threats, they said, something they attribute to “trolls” rather than “local people.” Someone threatened to kill Dane Lang’s dog, so he sent it away from the house to live with a family friend for “safe keeping.”

He said employees didn’t notice a difference in Rivera’s behavior after Tibbetts went missing.

“This guy stayed around for 35 days after he did this,” he said. “Nobody noticed a difference.”

Questions surrounding how the crime occurred

So far, investigators have not found anything indicating that Tibbetts and Rivera knew each other before the attack, Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of Iowa’s Division of Criminal Investigation, said in an interview Wednesday.

The area where Tibbetts went running is a narrow farm road leading out of town, Mortvedt said, and investigators are looking at whether her killer noticed her by chance or had seen her there on previous occasions.

In statements to investigators, Rivera said he spotted Tibbetts jogging and drove past her several times. The Chevrolet Malibu he was driving appeared in and out of surveillance footage from a camera aimed at the street.

“It seemed that he followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day,” Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Agent Rick Rahn told reporters. “And for whatever reason, he chose to abduct her.”

What happened next, Rivera told authorities, is blocked from his memory, something he said happens when he gets upset or angry. The next thing he recalled, he told investigators, was being inside the car and finding a headphone earpiece in his lap that did not belong to him. That prompted him to open the trunk, where he saw Tibbetts bleeding from the head.

Rivera told authorities he carried Tibbetts’s body into an isolated cornfield, where he covered her with stalks and walked away.

An ICE representative said the agency lodged an immigration detainer on Rivera after his arrest, so if he is ever released, he would be deported to Mexico.

Republican reaction

Trump referenced the case in a rally Tuesday, and in the video released Wednesday, he linked the tragedy to his desire for a border wall and tougher immigration policies.

Republican pollster Chris Wilson, who is working on several battleground Senate races, said the case “gets to the basic point Republicans have been making” that the immigration system needs to get stricter, adding, “Immigration as an issue is a winner for Republicans when we make it about security and crime.”

Statistics show that immigrants do not commit violent crimes at a higher rate than people born in the United States. In a February study published by the libertarian Cato Institute and examining 2015 criminal data in Texas, people born here were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants in the country legally or illegally.

Many conservative news outlets and allies of the president similarly highlighted Tibbetts’s death rather than the other news that emerged Tuesday — the conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman in one federal court and the guilty plea entered by his former attorney in another.

According to the news site Axios, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally, made the argument for focusing on Iowa explicit. Axios reported that he had emailed a journalist there to ensure they were covering Tibbetts’s death, saying, “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble.”