Former President Bill Clinton is on the campaign trail to drum up votes for Vice President Kamala Harris but that didn’t stop him from criticizing the current administration.
During remarks before supporters in Georgia, Clinton referred to the murder of nursing student Laken Riley in February by a migrant in the country illegally. In his comments, the former president noted that the tragedy could have been avoided if the Biden-Harris administration had properly vetted migrants like the alleged murderer.
“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,” a visibly aged Clinton said Sunday in Fort Valley. “Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
The alleged murderer was Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who illegally entered the U.S. in September 2022 under the disastrous border and immigration policies of Harris and President Joe BIden.
Clinton had been speaking at the fish fry event about how former President Trump pulled the rug out from under negotiations in Congress over a bipartisan border bill. This despite the fact that Ibarra had already illegally crossed the border under Biden’s watch years before the border bill was being debated.
“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,” he said of Harris. “And we did total vetting before people got in. Now, Trump killed the bill.”
“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 claimed
Oddly, Clinton also told the small crowd gathered in Georgia that “America is not having enough babies to keep the population up. So we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work.”
During an appearance in Columbus on Monday, Clinton contended that Americans don’t want “chaos” at the nation’s border, but they’re not “at replacement level, which means we gotta have somebody come here if we want to keep growing the economy.”
“Unless one of you with these Artificial Intelligence genius can figure out how we can all grow with no work,” he quipped.
However, Clinton defended Harris against criticism from Republicans and her opponent.
“They want to attack Kamala Harris and blame her for anything they managed to keep from happening. Like they claim she was the ‘border czar,’ that’s not what her jobs are,” he said.
“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,” he claimed. “That’s what she tried to do.”