Former President Bill Clinton suggested Monday that a nursing student’s murder would not have happened it her alleged killer had been vetted.
Clinton, who was campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris Monday in Georgia, was talking about the murder of Laken Riley, who was allegedly killed by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
According to Fox News, Clinton blamed former President Donald Trump of stopping negotiations regarding a bipartisan border compromise in Congress. Clinton said Trump did this to make it a campaign issue.
Even though the killer had already been vetted Clinton hinted Riley’s death could have been avoided if the compromise had been made.
“She’s the only candidate who has actually endorsed a bill that would hold down immigration 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, referring to Harris.
“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,” Clinton said.
“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,” the former president added.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) said that people who are encountered trying to cross the border illegally are vetted and screened.
CBP encountered the Riley’s killer on Sept. 8, 2022, after he entered the U.S. near El Paso, Texas. The suspect was “paroled and released for further processing,” Fox News Digital was told.
However, the bipartisan border deal failed earlier this year, years after the Venezuelan suspect entered the country during the Biden administration.
Clinton praised the Biden administration’s handling of the border and illegal immigration.
“For the last three years, the Biden-Harris administration has done increasingly tough things, trying to control the border. And illegal crossings have gone down every year for three years. Our friends in the other party don’t want to talk about that,” Clinton said.
The subject illegal crossings at the border has been a hot button topic during this election season.
Democrats are promoting tougher border security measures at a time when community infrastructures have been strained under the weight of immigrants seeking shelter in the U.S.
Republicans have criticized how Democrats have handled border security, often pointing to the record number of border crossings since Biden became president.
They frequently say Harris has failed in her role as “border czar.”
Clinton accused Republicans of bestowing the mainsleading title on Harris.
“They want to attack Kamala Harris and blame her for anything they managed to keep from happening,” Clinton said. “Like they claim she was the ‘border czar,’ that’s not what her jobs are.”
“Her job was to go down to these other countries that were sending us a lot of people and trying to get them, to enroll them in a legal process while they were still in the country so they wouldn’t be illegally trafficked, show up our border, had to be cared for on one side of it or another, and then we’d run the risk of having people get in here who weren’t properly vetted. That’s what she tried to do,” Clinton said.
Many political watchers went on X, formerly Twitter, to point out that Clinton was actually helping Trump’s cause.
