Trump campaign tries to push immigration issue over Bill Clinton’s comments on Laken Riley

(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is highlighting former President Bill Clinton’s comment Sunday that Georgia nursing student Laken Riley’s death “probably wouldn’t have happened” if migrants, including her alleged killer, had “all been properly vetted.”

Clinton’s remark came as he lambasted Trump for scuttling a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year. The bill sputtered in January when Trump’s opposition to it led Republican support to erode. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is looking to blunt Trump’s attacks on immigration, has vowed to revive that bill and sign it into law if she wins the White House.

Clinton said the bill would have led to “total vetting before people got in” at the US-Mexico border.

“Now, Trump killed the bill,” he said.

He then pointed to Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student who was killed while jogging in February. The suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, was arrested in 2022 after entering the United States illegally, according to a statement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but was released for further processing.

“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. Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened,” Clinton said. “But if they are all properly vetted, that doesn’t happen, and America is not having enough babies to keep our population up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work.”

But Trump’s campaign cast Clinton’s comments as an indictment of President Joe Biden and Harris’ handling of border security, noting that Riley’s alleged killer had entered the United States in 2022, long before that bill had been drafted.

“Kamala Harris claimed the border was ‘secure’ just days after Laken Riley’s illegal immigrant killer Jose Ibarra crossed into the nation. Ibarra was caught at the border and then released into the country by Kamala Harris,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement. “President Trump will secure the border and stop catch-and-release. This is why he was just endorsed by the Border Patrol Union.”

The Trump War Room account on X posted a video of Clinton’s remarks on Monday, which the Harris campaign said was “deceptively edited.”

“Clinton said Trump killed a bipartisan border security bill that VP Harris supported which would strengthen vetting for people entering the country,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the campaign, in a separate post on X.

The back-and-forth demonstrated how Democrats have tried to address what polls have shown is among Trump’s most potent issues – and how the former president has pushed back, accusing Biden and Harris of taking action far too late and only as the presidential election loomed.

Riley’s killing and the suspect’s immigration status renewed debate on the country’s immigration policies at the highest level. Biden held up a pin with Riley’s name on it at the State of the Union address in March.

Ibarra was indicted in May on charges of murder and aggravated assault with intent to rape, as well as for an earlier incident in which he allegedly peeped into the window of a student. He has pleaded not guilty in the case.

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