Trump campaign seizes on Bill Clinton’s Laken Riley comments as indictment of Harris’ handling of immigration

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.”

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.”