Kamala Harris isn’t happy with Bill Clinton. The former president, a Democrat All-Star for decades, made trouble for the Harris campaign Sunday when he acknowledged an obvious truth that Harris would rather not talk about – Laken Riley would very likely be alive today if not for the lax border security policies ordered and implemented by the Biden-Harris administration.
“You got 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,” said Clinton at a Harris campaign event in Fort Valley, Georgia. “Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Bill Clinton, meet Michael Kinsley, the liberal journalist who famously defined a "gaffe" as “when a politician tells the truth.”
On February 22 of this year, Riley’s body was found close to a walking trail in a wooded area near the Athens, Georgia campus of the University of Georgia. She had been a nursing student at Augusta University. Law enforcement authorities disclosed the following day that they had captured and charged an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Antonio Ibarra, with Riley’s murder.
Ibarra was only present in the United States because the Biden-Harris administration had made a deliberate decision to allow him into the country. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Ibarra had been detained by the Border Patrol on September 8, 2022, after he was caught entering the country unlawfully near El Paso, Texas.
It is unclear whether he had, after his apprehension, entered an asylum claim.
Whether he had or had not, he had entered the country unlawfully. He should have been detained and then deported. But the Biden-Harris administration – acting through Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his subordinates, carrying out a policy the Biden-Harris administration had earlier decided – had made a choice to allow Ibarra to remain in the country. So he had been released.
He had taken advantage of that leniency to travel to New York, where, on August 31, 2023, he had been caught driving an unregistered, uninsured gas-powered moped with a five-year-old child on the back, without any head protection or restraint for the child. Ibarra had been charged with reckless endangerment of a child and acting in a manner injurious to a child, along with a motor vehicle violation. He had been briefly jailed, then released.
He had left New York for Georgia, where he and his brother Diego Ibarra were then arrested for stealing from a Walmart in Athens.
After his most recent arrest, Ibarra – who never should have been in this country in the first place, and had repeatedly had run-ins with law enforcement authorities who had repeatedly made decisions to let him go – was charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call, and concealing the death of another.
He never would have been here to commit those crimes had it not been for a decision made by the Biden-Harris administration to allow people like him to stay in this country after being apprehended entering the country unlawfully.
Of course, Jose Antonio Ibarra isn’t the only one. The Biden-Harris administration’s open-borders policy has allowed more than 8.5 million illegal aliens to enter our country. Not surprisingly, this has led to a massive increase in the number of crimes committed by illegal aliens.
A review of the data showing arrests of criminal noncitizens, collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, tells the tale – from a total of just 2,438 in FY20, the numbers jump to 10,763 in FY21, 12,028 in FY22, 15,267 in FY23, and 15,608 in FY24.
In other words, over the last four years, while the Biden-Harris administration has been in charge of border security, the number of arrests of criminal noncitizens has increased by more than six times. And, consequently, the number of victims has also surged.
Because this issue is so important, Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund – the Super PAC affiliated with Tea Party Patriots Action – has pulled together background information on some of the most egregious cases and posted them here at Will Your Daughter Be Next.
While Harris and her senior campaign strategists may be mad at Clinton for inadvertently acknowledging and highlighting the ugly truth of the consequences of the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to allow the Jose Antonio Ibarras of the world to roam freely throughout the United States, Clinton is not the problem – the bad policy decision is the problem.
Personnel is policy. If you want to change the policy, change the personnel.
Jenny Beth Martin is Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund.