Since authorities announced on Aug. 22 that Cristhian Rivera, an unauthorized immigrant, was charged with first-degree murder in her death, politicians and pundits have used the arrest to push for stronger immigration laws.

In a column in The Des Moines Register on Saturday, her father, Rob Tibbetts, encouraged the debate on immigration. “But,” he added, “do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist.”

The Register on Friday published a column by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., in which he blamed Democrats for Tibbetts’ death and said claims that conservatives and Republicans were politicizing her death were “absurd.”

“The reaction from some Democrats and others on the left to the murder of Mollie Tibbetts is as despicable as it is revealing,” he said. “Unfortunately, Mollie was not the first casualty of the left’s love for open borders. The radical policies of the Democrats have left a trail of human wreckage in pursuit of their open borders dream.”

In an email Sunday, Tibbetts said he initially wrote the column to rebut Trump’s claims and asked for the same decency that Vice President Mike Pence showed him and his family.

“I chose to call out the racists among us and ask people to aspire to higher American ideals,” he said.

In his column, Tibbetts apologized to the Hispanic community for being “beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death.” Authorities have said that Rivera is from Mexico.

“The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people,” Tibbetts wrote.

Mollie Tibbetts, 20, was last seen while on a run in her hometown, Brooklyn, Iowa, on July 18. Surveillance video led them to Rivera, who they said later led them to her body.

Trump has repeatedly linked crime to illegal immigration, despite studies that show otherwise.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Melissa Gomez © 2018 The New York Times