Previous immigration policies are being blamed after the arrest of a Salvadoran migrant who is charged with fatally stabbing two women in New York, one of them a “hardworking mother of two,” whom he worked with at a Wendy’s.
Rony Yahir Alvarenga Rivera, 22, was taken into custody Saturday on Long Island for the deaths of his 32-year-old roommate and also his 42-year-old coworker, Ana Maria del Aguila-Cordova, the Daily Mail reported.
Authorities say he knew both victims in what appears be a homicidal rampage with a yet-to-be-determined motive.
Aguila-Cordova was killed while taking out garbage at a Wendy’s restaurant in Island Park on Friday, where the alleged assailant also worked, police said.
Officers found her bloody body when they arrived on that scene at 12:30 a.m. Friday.
At 3:00 a.m. they discovered the body of Rivera’s 32-year-old roommate, who is yet to be identified, at an apartment building in Valley Stream.
Nassau County Police Chief Patrick Ryder told reporters, “Both females were killed by multiple stab wounds to the neck and torso.”
Rivera, who has been charged with first and second-degree murder, acted in “anger” George Darienzo, commanding officer of the Nassau police homicide unit, told NBC4 without elaborating any further.
Rivera is a native of El Salvador and has no known gang connection, Darienzo said.
At the news conference, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who is a Republican running against incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), slammed what he called “open borders” immigration policies under prior presidential administrations that allowed most anyone to stay in the U.S.
“This didn’t have to happen,” he said. “This is a policy that has resulted today in two women being killed. They could’ve gone on to have very productive and happy lives. But they’re no longer with us because of failed policies in the past.”
Rivera showed up in the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor a decade ago at age 12, Blakeman said. He was allowed to “run around without any supervision whatsoever” and then to grow up and “automatically” get “legal status in our country.”
“In 2022, the federal government had a program where any unaccompanied minors that were in the United States automatically would receive papers that let them stay here legally in the form, I believe, of a green card,” Blakeman said.
Blakeman said a federal partnership program called 287(g) that allows local police to perform limited immigration enforcement functions under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision has allowed Nassau County to remove “over 2000 illegal migrants with criminal records.”
It is a program he says Gov. Hochul wants to abolish.
Victim Aguila-Cordova, a Long Beach mom, leaves behind two young children ages one and eight.
Rivera is expected in court on Tuesday.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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