[mindslight]

For sure, that is a tragedy with failures of multiple institutions. But a single anecdote doesn't form a general argument! I would say that the main result of putting emphasis on such anecdotes is to make people crave overly simplistic solutions - that exact "mass-media-induced spite" I am talking about.

In this instance, if the murderer had been prevented from reentering the country, this murder would not have happened. Everyone can agree this would have been a much better outcome.

But we can easily imagine a slightly different situation where the mother gets deported, the kid stays here in the "care" of the boyfriend, and then gets subsequently strangled by the citizen-but-criminal boyfriend.

Without data and a logical model, we're hopelessly lost in the weeds. Data for putting in context how prevalent various types of these occurrences actually are. And a logical model that keeps the focus on the relevant details. For instance, the [presumably criminal] convictions seem much more relevant here than the immigration status. And the immigration status seems like a red herring that feeds into those simplistic answers.