As our nation’s capital prepares for a transition of power in January, look for the corporate media to spend considerable energy trying to rehabilitate Joe Biden’s presidency for history. Much will be written and said about how he was well-meaning, inherited many intractable problems and how he should be remembered for managing the country through a tumultuous moment in history.
This is absolute nonsense and should be disregarded as such. The enduring memory of the Biden presidency should be the face of Jose Ibarra, the illegal alien who was recently convicted of murdering 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. His story perfectly captures the folly of Biden’s immigration policies and the senseless loss of life that they caused.
Ibarra, 26, is a Venezuelan national and a member of the ruthless Tren de Aragua gang. He entered the United States illegally in September 2022 through the southern border near El Paso, Texas. Border Patrol apprehended him but, according to the Biden Administration’s catch-and-release policy, he was set free into the U.S. anyway.
After finding his way to New York City, Ibarra stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel migrant shelter. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials told a New York news outlet that Ibarra had been arrested there on September 14, 2023 and was “charged with acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 and a motor vehicle license violation.” However, because of the city’s sanctuary laws, New York law enforcement released Ibarra before ICE could issue a detainer for his arrest and possible deportation.
Ibarra later took a free flight to Atlanta, paid for by federal taxpayer money courtesy of the Biden-Harris Administration. Once in Athens, Georgia, a local court issued a bench warrant for his arrest in December 2023 after he failed to appear in court to respond to shoplifting charges. This also did not trigger deportation for Ibarra, allowing him to brutally murder Riley in February of this year while she was on a morning run in a park.
The chronology of Ibarra’s time in the U.S. shows multiple points at which Riley’s murder could have been prevented, and illustrates how Biden immigration policies enabled his crimes. By halting construction of the border wall and instituting catch-and-release via executive order on Inauguration Day 2021, Biden created the conditions under which a menace to society like Ibarra could enter the country and stay here. The migrant shelters in once-great New York City hotels, funded partly with federal taxpayer money, gave Ibarra a place to stay and access to the hotel’s “reticketing center” which provided migrants with federally-funded, one-way plane tickets to any destination.
Ibarra’s crimes prior to Riley’s murder should have prompted federal authorities to arrest him and place him in deportation proceedings. But New York’s sanctuary policies, which the Biden Administration strongly supported, prevented ICE agents from detaining him. Athens’ Clarke County is not officially a sanctuary jurisdiction, but thanks to the anti-borders leanings of its Mayor, Kelly Girtz, it essentially operates as one. And an entirely unnecessary chain of open borders virtue-signaling led to the entirely preventable murder of a U.S. citizen who was trying to dedicate her life to serving others.
If these tragic results sound far removed from Biden’s Oval Office, they’re not. At a Democratic presidential primary debate in 2019, Joe Biden looked into the camera and urged the world’s aspiring migrants to “surge the border.” This was not just a cheap, campaign throwaway line. Those outside the U.S. seeking to enter the country illegally heard that as the invitation it was, and they flooded the southern border accordingly.
It was also not a case of well-meant policies gone awry. Kamala Harris’s defeat in the presidential election came down to a handful of questions she either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. One of them was why, after less than a year in office as vice president when it was clear the border was being overwhelmed by millions of foreign nationals, did she and Joe Biden do nothing to fix the situation? Why was she proposing tough border security measures on the campaign trail, when she could have implemented them almost four years ago? The border surge was not an accident. It was invited and intended.
It is not hyperbole to say that, absent Joe Biden’s partisan social engineering experiment with our border, Laken Riley would be alive today. The same could be said for Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and numerous other innocents who were killed by noncitizens in the country illegally. Rather than protect us from this threat, Joe Biden called us racists and xenophobes for daring to expect border security from our government.
Ignore the manufactured narratives that are emerging about Joe Biden’s good intentions and dubious achievements over the last four years. The defining images of the Biden presidency are Jose ibarra’s mug shot and Laken Riley’s family weeping at his sentencing. Biden’s legacy should wear them like a millstone for all eternity.
Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C, and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.
