What Trump Should Do About Charlotte
The killing of Iryna Zarutska should catalyze a crackdown on urban crime.
What Trump Should Do About Charlotte
Yesterday, when asked about the brutal stabbing of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train, President Trump admitted he hadn’t yet been briefed, but promised he would “know all about it by tomorrow morning.”
He’s right to take it seriously. This horrific killing is not just another “local crime story.” It’s the predictable outcome of a criminal-justice culture that prioritizes avoiding the appearance of racism over protecting innocent citizens.
For years, Trump and his close advisor Stephen Miller have trained their fire on crimes committed by illegal aliens—from high-profile rape-murders to the less visible but more numerous vehicular homicides caused by unlicensed drunk drivers. That was the core argument for tougher immigration enforcement: the state’s first duty is to shield its citizens from preventable harm.
But now something new is happening. Miller’s posts about the Charlotte homicide and other examples of so-called “urban crime” show that the Trump inner circle is turning its attention toward the domestic crime crisis, especially in Democrat-run cities where repeat violent offenders are coddled in the name of “equity.”
Statistically, native-born African Americans commit violent crimes at significantly higher per-capita rates than both whites and illegal immigrants. Ignoring those realities has had deadly consequences.
The Ideology of Leniency
When George Soros funded “progressive prosecutor” campaigns in cities from Philadelphia to Chicago to St. Louis, he defended it in the Wall Street Journal by lamenting that blacks were five times as likely as whites to be incarcerated. But as Charles Murray has documented, black violent crime rates are closer to ten times higher than those of whites. That math matters. Pretending away racial disparities in crime, and punishing police and prosecutors for noticing them, has created a system where dangerous repeat offenders are released again and again — until they kill someone.
That’s exactly what happened in Charlotte. Zarutska fled a war zone only to be murdered in a city with a higher per-capita homicide rate than wartime Ukraine.
When local officials downplay the killer’s record, or refuse even to condemn him, it shows how far the tilt has gone. The presumption of “anti-black bias” has morphed into real pro-offender bias, with catastrophic results for victims of every race.
What Washington Can Do
Trump can’t (and shouldn’t) try to dictate every charging decision in every city. But as he showed in Washington, D.C.—where the U.S. Attorney directly handles local crimes—the federal government has real tools to stop the revolving door for violent criminals:
Flood the zone with federal prosecutions: U.S. Attorneys can prioritize felon-in-possession, carjacking, robbery, fentanyl, and RICO cases, pulling the most violent repeaters off the street with federal sentences that stick. See Project Safe Neighborhoods for how this is already structured.
Use D.C. as the model: In the capital, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. uniquely prosecutes both federal and most local crimes. Success there can be showcased and exported nationwide.
Tie federal dollars to accountability: Cities that want Byrne Justice Assistance Grants or COPS grants should have to publish transparent data on how they handle violent felony arrests—charge rates, detention motions, plea bargains. If their prosecutors are quietly tossing cases, the public should know it.
Enforce Title VI against racial favoritism: If there’s evidence that local officials are deliberately declining charges for offenders of one race, DOJ can investigate under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Go after fugitives and repeaters: The U.S. Marshals Service Violent Offender Task Forces and ATF can partner with local police to clear warrant backlogs and make sure the worst offenders aren’t left walking around.
These measures don’t abolish local discretion; they restore a baseline of public safety that local politics can’t wish away.
From Immigration to Urban Crime
The connective tissue is obvious: the same principle that animated Trump’s immigration crackdown—no preventable American deaths at the hands of criminals who should not have been here—applies to citizens endangered by repeat violent offenders who should not have been free. If ICE keeps deporting illegal aliens, but local DAs and judges keep releasing career predators in the name of “equity,” the protection is incomplete.
For a Ukrainian woman to face greater odds of violent death in Charlotte than in Kiev should be unacceptable in America. The President has the tools to change that tilt, if he chooses to use them.
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