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by Ken Sandler
If you don’t understand how anyone can still support ICE after all of its abuses, then pay attention to the stories that right-wing media and politicians peddle to their viewers and supporters. Here’s one close to home: a highly misleading claim that between 50% and 75% of the murders committed in Fairfax County in 2026 have been committed by undocumented immigrants.
Let’s examine these stories spread by the Trump Department of Homeland Security and the usual right-wing media sources. The first thing to understand is that Fairfax County, despite a population of nearly 1.2 million people, has some of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation.
According to the County Police, the entirety of Fairfax County (population: 1.2 million) has so far in 2026 seen a total of 9 homicides. This means we remain among the counties with the lowest murder rates in the U.S. – around 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people, nearly three-quarters less than the national rate of 4.1 per 100,000 – particularly impressive for a dense, major metropolitan area. And that is in a county in which immigrants constitute almost 31% of the population.
In other words, we have over 369,000 immigrant neighbors – including an estimated 100,000 undocumented migrants – NOT committing murders or other crimes, just doing their jobs, wasting their time on social media and taking out the garbage like the rest of us.
So, these claims ascribing large percentages of local murders to undocumented aliens are based on carving up a very small baseline. Even so, the numbers don’t make sense. Fox 5 lists the 9 homicides recorded in the county so far in 2026, ascribes 4 of them to undocumented immigrants and calls that “50% of the cases”. Now, I was an English and Political Science major, but I learned enough math in school to figure out that 4 is only 44% of 9, not 50%. Perhaps Fox5 could use some of their advertising revenue to…buy a calculator?
Not surprisingly, the Trump Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has played a big part in ramping up the inflammatory and hate-mongering rhetoric, putting out a breathless, partisan, adjective-heavy release “asking Virginia sanctuary politicians” not to release one of the murder suspects – even though Virginia is not a so-called “sanctuary state” and has no “sanctuary cities”.
Such propaganda is part of the long-standing Big Lie that immigrants to the U.S. tend to be violent criminals, dating back to the first day of Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he declared: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
In fact, research has consistently shown that native-born Americans are responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes in this country, while immigrant crime rates tend to be quite low by comparison. Trump and his minions constantly use distorted or made-up numbers to claim huge immigrant murder rates, but these claims always fall apart with the slightest scrutiny.
Yet this Big Lie is politically important to the MAGA GOP, because fear, prejudice and hatred are sadly motivating to millions of voters, regardless of the actual truth.
Personally, I spend very little time reading murder stories because they tend to just leave me saddened by the senseless tragedies they represent. But looking into the stories hyped by right-wing media, if there are lessons to be drawn and policies to be established in response, they have little to do with immigration.
Take the much-hyped case of a 19-year-old, Alexis Antonio Cedillos-Campos, who stabbed 42-year-old Carmen Lizet Puch to death in Great Falls in August. They were coworkers reported to have had an intimate relationship. This is tragically a common occurrence – a 2022 Justice Department-funded study found that of the nearly 5,000 women killed by men in 2021, 34% were killed by an intimate partner. This was also the awful story at the heart of the county’s most prominent non-immigrant murder of the year, namely that of former Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax killing his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax.
So, is the fact that Cedillos-Campos came here as an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador really the most important detail to focus on in this case? Or might there be lessons in how we as a society teach men to treat those they consider their lovers?
The right-wing propaganda machine likes to ghoulishly harp on the salacious details of rapes and murders of women by undocumented immigrants in much the same way that Nazis spread stories accusing Jews of sexual violence. It’s about appealing to the worst emotions in the mob, certainly not to reason, rationality or common sense.
I only found out about the MAGA focus on murders in Fairfax County after reading some of the comments posted on social media under statements Northern Virginia members of Congress made condemning the recent incident in which an ICE officer stuck a loaded gun in the face of a local resident for expressing her First Amendment-protected opinions of them.
These comments were generally along the lines of: the woman threatened by the ICE officer (a Latina American citizen) deserved what she got and such brutality is justified considering the out-of-control murders in the area by undocumented immigrants.
If that does not sound logical to you, then you are not susceptible to the logic of fascism – which, as Professor Jason Stanley discussed in his book How Fascism Works, is all about dividing society into US and THEM. Us = the usual white Christian straight conservative while them = everyone else, but especially the non-white outsider who is easy to spot. Those outsiders need to be “kept in line” with force, the argument goes, or society will spin out of control.
And so, the MAGA propaganda machine brings enormous attention to every crime by a non-white immigrant, out of a desire not for procedural, dispassionate justice, but for “justice” of the lynch mob kind. It’s a sad old story and one we need to banish to the dustbin of history ASAP.
I mostly write on environmental and energy issues but occasionally will draw on my political science background to compose a piece like this one. To follow my work, please subscribe to my newsletter Regenerative Futures at LinkedIn or Substack.
