An illegal alien who was free in the United States due to liberal Democratic immigration policies was charged on Friday for the brutal murder of a University of Georgia student. But you might not know that from the mainstream media coverage.
It’s the latest example of the media playing defense for President Joe Biden’s failed immigration policies.
At a press conference on Friday afternoon, Athens, Georgia, police revealed that Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan national who was not a U.S. resident, had been charged for the murder of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student, while she was jogging on campus. Later that evening, NewsNation‘s Ali Bradley first reported that Ibarra had been arrested for illegally crossing the southern border in September 2022 and “paroled” into the country by President Joe Biden, like more than 1 million other migrants. Bradley also revealed that Ibarra was arrested in New York later in September for endangering a child, but was shielded from deportation by the city’s “sanctuary” policies.
In a report on Saturday, the Associated Press likened Riley’s murder to that of Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student who was killed by an illegal alien while jogging in 2018. But the AP did not mention the role of illegals in either case. Instead, the news agency’s focus was on the risks of exercising alone while female.
The killing of a nursing student out for a run highlights the fears of solo female athletes https://t.co/RYCpB53JmJ
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 25, 2024
The Washington Post and other outlets republished the AP article.
In initial reports on Riley’s murder on Friday, CBS News and ABC News similarly made no reference to Ibarra’s immigration status.
The AP and numerous others noted on Friday that Ibarra was not a U.S. citizen but only lower down in their reports—after describing him as a resident of Athens. The articles did not discuss the federal and New York policies that prevented immigration law enforcement against Ibarra.
The mainstream media have a long record of playing down the consequences of failed Democratic border policies. After Tibbets’s killer was convicted in 2021, headlines from CNN, the New York Times, ABC News, and NBC News described him not as an illegal alien but rather as a “farm worker.” Another ABC News story ahead of the verdict did not mention that the killer was an illegal at all, describing him only as “a Mexican national.”
Still, according to a Monmouth University poll released on Monday, just 26 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the border and 61 percent of Americans say illegal immigration is a “very serious problem.”
