Overview
The “fact checker” PolitiFact asserts that President Biden had nothing to do with the murder of a nursing student by an illegal border crosser because “Biden does not decide who is released into the country.”
In reality, the president has vast powers to decide who is allowed into the U.S., and the person charged with this murder was let in as a direct consequence of Biden’s actions.
This murder is not an isolated instance. Homicides committed by non-citizens are hundreds of times more common than other types of murders that media outlets often focus on.
Biden’s Actions
During the Republican Party’s formal response to Biden’s recent State of the Union address, U.S. Senator Katie Britt of Alabama blamed “President Biden’s senseless border policies” for “horrific murders” and spoke about this recent one:
Just think about Laken Riley. In my neighboring state of Georgia, this beautiful, 22-year-old nursing student went out on a jog one morning. But she never got the opportunity to return home. She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland.
Countering Britt, PolitiFact reporters Marta Campabadal Graus and Maria Ramirez Uribe claim that:
Biden does not decide who is released into the country. Border officials decide whom to release into the U.S. because they lack enough resources to detain everyone who illegally crosses U.S. borders.
PolitiFact’s statement—made without any evidence to support it—is a flagrant falsehood disproven by the following facts:
- Border officials work for the Department of Homeland Security, which is under the authority of Biden and the person he appointed to lead this agency, Alejandro Mayorkas.
- On his first day in office, Biden temporarily suspended President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy (formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols), which required border officials to quickly eject the vast bulk of Central Americans who illegally cross the U.S./Mexico border. Any of these migrants who claimed to have a legal basis to be in the U.S. could then wait in Mexico while their cases were adjudicated—instead of being released into the U.S. where deportation is extremely unlikely.
- Four months later, Mayorkas permanently terminated Remain in Mexico to the cheers of “migrant rights advocates” who called this “a huge victory” and welcomed the illegal border crossers into the U.S. with literal hugs.
- After a federal judge and a federal appeals court ordered the Biden administration to reinstate Remain in Mexico, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 ruling in June 2022 that allowed Biden to end it.
- Three months later in September 2022, a Venezuelan migrant named Jose Ibarra illegally crossed the U.S./Mexico border, was arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol, and was released into the U.S.—an action generally prohibited under Remain in Mexico.
- A year and a half later, Ibarra was arrested for the murder of Riley. READ MORE