Former President Bill Clinton said during a campaign event for Vice President Kamala Harris that the alleged killer of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley wasn't "properly vetted" at the border and "probably" wouldn't have been able to commit the crime if there was additional security at the border.
Riley, a student at Augusta University, was murdered earlier this year while jogging. A Venezuelan national who entered the U.S. illegally, José Antonio Ibarra, was later arrested and charged with the crime.
Ibarra was previously detained before being granted parole "due to detention capacity at the Central Processing Center in El Paso, Texas," according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Clinton, during remarks to voters in Georgia on Sunday at a Harris rally, linked Riley's death to the failure of the bipartisan border bill and blamed former President Donald Trump for pushing Republicans to vote against the measure, which Clinton suggested would have helped fund additional border security that would have prevented Ibarra from entering the country.
He said that Harris is "the only candidate who has actually endorsed a bill that would hold down immigration in any given year to a certain point and then made sure we gave people a decent place to live, didn't divide people from their children. And we did total vetting before people got in. Now Trump killed the bill."
Clinton said, "You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn't you? They made an ad about it, a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant. Yeah, well, if they'd all been properly vetted that probably wouldn't have happened.
"And America isn't having enough babies to keep our populations up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work — there wouldn't be a problem," he added.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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