Former president Bill Clinton, while campaigning on Monday for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, said Laken Riley’s death—allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant from Venezuela—"probably wouldn’t have happened" had the killer been "properly vetted."
"You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you? They made an ad about it, about a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant," Clinton said at a rally for Harris in Georgia. "If they had all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn't have happened."
Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was killed in February while she was running on a trail at the University of Georgia in Athens. Authorities charged Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal immigrant, with malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, and aggravated assault with intent to rape, to which he pleaded not guilty. The trial is scheduled to begin on November 13.
The 26-year-old suspect entered the United States illegally through El Paso, Texas, in September 2022 and was released via parole just a day after being taken into custody, Fox News reported. In March 2021, Biden designated Vice President Harris as his point person on addressing the illegal immigration crisis.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has tried to distance herself from the Biden-Harris administration’s failure to secure the southern border. More than 7.8 million migrants have illegally crossed the U.S. southern border under the Biden-Harris administration, with more than 13,000 illegal immigrants convicted of murder now at large in the United States, according to ICE.
Ibarra has ties to Venezuela’s violent Tren de Aragua gang, whose armed members recently took over apartment buildings in Colorado and Texas, according to federal court documents reviewed by Fox.