Republicans pulled a bait-and-switch with one man's death
A man is dead in western Kansas.
Erlin Y. Lagos-Gonzales, a Honduran citizen living in Garden City, has been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the Aug. 31 death of Adonis Edgardo Aguilar-Juarez at a livestock facility in Kearny County. A federal immigration judge had issued Lagos-Gonzales a final order of removal in July 2025. He remains presumed innocent unless the state proves the charge.
Those facts are serious enough on their own. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach immediately gave them a broader political meaning.
“This killing never should have happened,” he said, before arguing that law-enforcement agencies should collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to locate and remove people with final removal orders.
The policy connection was not inferred by critics. Kobach himself made it. One charged homicide became the evidentiary vehicle for a general claim about immigration enforcement.
That is where the hypocrisy begins. When a native-born American commits a murder, we generally understand the concept of individuality perfectly well. We ask about motive, rage, domestic conflict, ideology, drugs, mental illness, opportunity or the peculiar facts of that person’s life. Citizenship is rarely offered as the explanation. We do not normally treat a citizen’s violence as evidence that citizens, or white Americans, or white men, are collectively dangerous.
But when the accused is an undocumented immigrant, the individual’s immigration status can suddenly become the headline, the explanation and the policy prescription all at once.
The aggregate evidence does not justify that asymmetry. A peer-reviewed study using unusually detailed Texas arrest data found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens across violent, property and drug offenses.
A later National Institute of Justice-funded report cautioned policymakers against linking crime increases to unauthorized immigrant populations without robust evidence and found no significant association between estimated unauthorized immigrant population size and arrest rates after accounting for known correlates of crime and robustness checks.
One horrific case does not erase those denominators.
Chapter seven of my book makes the double standard concrete by naming native-born white offenders whose crimes are seared into American memory: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, James Holmes, Scott Peterson, Chris Watts, Timothy McVeigh, Patrick Crusius, Robert Bowers and Stephen Paddock. Beyond that numbered list: Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, James Alex Fields Jr. and John T. Earnest.
Their crimes were monstrous. Yet their whiteness and citizenship did not routinely become a generalized policy category called “white male crime.” The individual remained the individual. That privilege of individuality is exactly what disappears when the defendant is an immigrant or another racialized outsider.
Another reality makes the criminal-immigrant stereotype especially simplistic. Undocumented people often have powerful reasons to fear contact with law enforcement.
Research on Latino communities has found that greater fear of deportation is associated with a lower likelihood of reporting crimes and lower confidence in police and courts. Other scholarship about migrants with irregular status likewise documents fear that contact with police can expose them to immigration consequences.
This does not mean undocumented people never commit crimes. It means the common picture of undocumented immigrants casually embracing conduct likely to attract police attention ignores a basic feature of undocumented life: Official attention can carry consequences that most citizens never have to contemplate.
That fear also creates a public safety complication that slogans erase. If immigrants are afraid that reporting a crime, appearing as a witness or cooperating with police may expose them or someone in their family to immigration enforcement, crimes can go unreported and investigations can become harder. The research is not perfectly uniform, and undocumented communities are not monolithic. But the existence of this documented fear is relevant to any serious claim that more entanglement between local policing and immigration enforcement automatically makes communities safer.
This is where the cognitive science matters. Human beings are not spreadsheets. We process vivid stories more easily than denominators. We form in-groups and out-groups. We give familiar people more benefit of the doubt, and we are more likely to treat a frightening act by an outsider as information about the outsider’s group.
System-justification research adds another layer: When people perceive the social order as threatened, they become more inclined to defend familiar hierarchies and explanations. My book calls the related process “meh relegation”: inconvenient information gets pushed into the cognitive background because the emotionally satisfying story feels more real.
That mechanism is politically universal.
Republican voters are not uniquely susceptible to it, and neither are Democratic voters. But political identity matters because messages from trusted in-group leaders can arrive with built-in credibility. Here, a Republican attorney general deliberately connected a homicide committed by a Honduran national to a broader immigration-enforcement argument.
We cannot establish Kobach’s private mental state or whether he consciously intended to exploit racialized fear or cognitive bias from the statement alone. But the rhetorical structure is inescapable: a vivid death, an outsider, a threat narrative and a policy demand — without the comparative crime-rate evidence that would allow citizens to evaluate the generalization.
That deserves scrutiny because Kobach is not merely a campaign surrogate or television commentator.
The Kansas Attorney General Office’s own website describes Kobach as the state’s “chief legal officer and top law enforcement official.” The office includes the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. When the state’s highest law enforcement official makes an empirical public safety claim, the evidentiary standard ought to be higher than the emotional force of a single case. The more powerful the office, the higher the ethical responsibility to distinguish a tragedy from a trend.
None of this minimizes Aguilar-Juarez’s death. If the state proves Lagos-Gonzales committed voluntary manslaughter, he should be held accountable under the law.
If federal authorities failed to execute a valid removal order, that failure can be investigated on its own terms. If Kansas wants to evaluate whether a particular form of ICE cooperation improves public safety, it can examine actual outcomes. Those are legitimate questions. What is not sound reasoning is using an alleged act as though it proves a proposition about millions of people while comparable crimes committed by native-born white Americans remain resolutely individual.
There is also an ethical question here that cannot be answered by crime statistics alone. At what point does using a person’s death as the emotionally potent substitute for aggregate evidence become more than ordinary political rhetoric?
When a public official knows or has ready access to the denominator, the comparison group and the contrary research, but presents the anecdote without them, constituents are entitled to ask whether grief is being used to do persuasive work that the evidence itself cannot do. That question is especially serious when the speaker is the state’s top law-enforcement official.
Look again at what is easiest to lose.
The best comparative evidence does not show undocumented immigrants to be more violent than native-born citizens. Undocumented people often have reasons to avoid law enforcement contact and can be reluctant to report crimes because of deportation fears. The long list of spectacular native-born white violence has never produced an equivalent presumption that one white offender represents white Americans generally. This particular Kansas case, however tragic, cannot supply a denominator it does not contain.
Do you see how powerful these impulses are? Even when you now know the evidence, can you feel how easy it is to just “meh” away the truth because the original story — foreign criminal, dangerous immigrants, more enforcement — is simpler and more emotionally satisfying?
The frightening anecdote still feels more real than the denominator. The outsider still feels more representative of his group than the insider. That is precisely the cognitive vulnerability my book describes. The first defense against it is to recognize the move when it happens.
Rory Bahadur is the author of “A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity” and the James R. Ahrens Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law but his views are his own and do not represent those of Washburn University. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.