Several Republicans have seized on the immigration status of a man charged last week with sexual abuse and other offenses allegedly involving an underage girl in Alabama.
Those claims come despite statistics showing that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
U.S. House Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Tom McClintock of California, chairman of the committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, were the latest Republicans to inject politics into the case of Pablo Mendoza, 23.
Mendoza, who is accused of sexually abusing and sodomizing a 14-year-old girl March 25 in Enterprise, is undocumented, Coffee County Sheriff Scott Byrd told WDHN.
The complaint against Mendoza, filed in Coffee County District Court said his alleged victim could not consent “by reason of being physically helpless or mentally incapacitated.”
Prosecutors initially charged Mendoza with rape but have since dropped the charge. They refiled the case, charging Mendoza with sodomy, sexual abuse and human trafficking, according to WTVY.
State court records showed the rape charge was dropped but the new offenses against Mendoza were yet to be uploaded as of Friday afternoon.
Mendoza’s attorney had no comment, a person in his office told AL.com.
Jordan and McClintock are asking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide the subcommittee with data on Mendoza’s Homeland Security case history, details on “any and all” of Mendoza’s entries into the country.
They are also seeking information on Mendoza’s processing by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials and whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lodged an immigration detainer against him.
“Criminal aliens exploit vulnerabilities in our nation’s immigration system to the detriment of those in the United States,” the congressmen wrote Thursday to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, according to a copy of their letter obtained by 1819 News, a website that was once owned by the Alabama Policy Institute.
“The Biden Administration’s border and immigration policies only increase the likelihood that criminal aliens will successfully enter and remain in the U.S.,” the letter went on to state. “Pursuant to the Rules of the House of Representatives, the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to conduct oversight of federal immigration policy and procedures.”
From the first media report that detailed Mendoza’s immigration status, Republicans said the case was the result of President Biden’s immigration policy, including the congressman representing the area where the alleged crime occurred.
“My prayers are with this young girl and her family. Thanks to Biden’s reprehensible open border policies, every town is a border town, including mine,” Rep. Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, said in a statement released on March 27.
“Biden undid every single one of President Trump’s border security initiatives with the stroke of a pen, and he could bring them back today and protect American families if he wanted to. Biden also could have helped pass H.R.2, the strongest border bill in history, that passed the House a year ago and still awaits a vote in the Senate. Instead, he has chosen to do nothing as eight million illegals, including 617,000 with a criminal record, pour across our southern border. The blood and the broken hearts of these tragedies are on Biden’s hands.”
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville also tied Mendoza’s arrest to Biden.
“This is Pablo Mendoza. He is an illegal alien who was just arrested in South Alabama for raping a mentally incapacitated 14 year old girl. @JoeBiden is aiding and abetting these monsters. #SayHerName,” Tuberville posted to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
Victims of sexual assaults are generally not publicly identified by law enforcement or journalists.
Linking crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants to immigration policy under Biden is not a novel strategy implemented by Republicans.
The case of Laken Riley, a nursing student whose body was found on the University of Georgia campus and was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Ibarra while Riley was out jogging, was exploited by the GOP for political purposes.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., shouted at Biden to say Riley’s name during his State of the Union address last month, and Sen. Katie Britt mentioned the Riley case in her rebuttal to Biden’s speech, saying the president was to “blame” for Riley’s murder.
When Grevi Geovani Rivera-Zavala, 29, of Honduras pleaded guilty this week in the 2023 rape of a teen girl in the bathroom of a Prattville restaurant, District Attorney CJ Robinson said “failed policies allowed for this crime to occur.”
Rivera-Zavala entered the U.S. illegally, was briefly detained, and then was then released despite the fact that he had a criminal record, Robinson said.
“I pray our federal government adopts stronger immigration policies to identify and prevent dangerous illegals from entering our country looking to commit criminal acts‚’’ Robinson said.
While Republicans paint undocumented immigrants as violent criminals responsible for an uptick in crime across the country, the statistics don’t bear that out.
The CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, conducted a study in 2020 showing that undocumented immigrants were convicted of crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans, although undocumented immigrants did have higher conviction rates than immigrants in the country legally.
The CATO study was based on crime data in Texas, which the institute said was the only state to record and keep immigration status for arrests.
“It could be that illegal immigrants in Texas are the most law‐abiding illegal immigrant population in the country – or the least law‐abiding. Until other states start recording and keeping the data, we won’t know for sure. But there is much suggestive evidence that the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate in Texas is comparable to their crime rates across the country,” CATO’s Alex Nowrasteh said of the study.
Efforts to reach Alabama-based immigrant advocacy groups HICA and the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice for this article were unsuccessful.
