First things first: Twenty-year-old University of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts wasn’t killed by a “farmworker” or a “farm laborer.” She was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant.

The mainstream media tried mightily to soften the blow on behalf of the Biden administration, House and Senate Democrats, the ACLU, and other open-borders activists by ignoring the “illegal” aspect of 26-year-old Cristhian Bahena Rivera’s immigration status — as if they could somehow hide his heinous crime of stalking then repeatedly stabbing Tibbetts while she was out for a jog, and dumping her body in a remote cornfield on July 18, 2018.

So CNN, CBS, ABC, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo, the Daily Beast, and a host of others all decided to call Bahena Rivera a “farmworker” or a “farm laborer” in their headlines, and bury his illegal immigrant status deep in the story — if they reported it at all. Why, it’s almost as if they were in collusion.

“Farm worker found guilty of killing University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts,” went the CNN headline. “Farmworker Convicted of Fatally Stabbing Iowa College Student,” reported the New York Times.

More and more, we see these activist media organs resorting to what George Orwell called “political language” — language that is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Replacing “illegal immigrant” with a benign word like “farmworker” is certainly an attempt to do that.

Nearly three years after he killed Tibbetts, Rivera was finally convicted on Friday of first-degree murder after a two-week trial in Davenport, Iowa. “Jurors reached their decision after deliberating for just over seven hours,” Fox News reports. “Bahena Rivera, who came to the U.S. illegally from Mexico as a teenager, will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which is a mandatory sentence upon conviction.”

We’d like to think we were writing this article for Mollie, but we aren’t. Neither she nor her family wanted to make an issue of her killer’s immigration status. It’s hard to imagine that kind of strength and decency amid such unspeakable pain.

So we’re writing this for the next Mollie, and the next, and the next. Because while President Joe Biden’s immigration catastrophe could’ve been prevented, it can’t be undone. And our nation will be suffering its effects in perpetuity.

As Andrew Arthur writes at the Center for Immigration Studies, “The latest CBP statistics reveal Border Patrol has apprehended an increased number of aliens with criminal convictions this year. … In the first seven months of this fiscal year, Border Patrol has ‘encountered’ 5,861 aliens with criminal convictions, more than twice as many as in all of FY 2020 (2,438), and already more than 37 percent more than in all of FY 2019 (4,269).”

Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was right about a lot of things, whereas the mainstream media was reflexively wrong. Immigration was certainly one of them. “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” he said in 2018. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”

And in the particular case of Cristhian Bahena Rivera, candidate Trump was certainly right back in 2015. “When Mexico sends its people,” he said, “they’re not sending their best.”