Rutgers professors Alyvia Walters and Regina Marchi have published the article "From local tragedy to national news: Twitter, anti-immigrant discourse, and the weaponization of public grief online" in the Atlantic Journal of Communication. This article discusses anti-immigrant discourse on Twitter related to the 2018 murder of a 20-year-old White woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant. Additionally, it examines how the news narrative of her death was "usurped by Donald Trump and the right-wing Twittersphere and redeployed in the service of anti-immigrant narratives that the Tibbets family did not support".
For more information and access to the article, visit https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2025.2466556.