By Blue Apples
With 7.3 million illegal immigrants entering into the country since Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, the national security threat of an unsecured border has become perhaps the biggest issue heading into the 2024 Presidential Election. The border crisis has even overshadowed a stagnant economy and foreign policy that has seen entangle itself in several theaters of war abroad. While the Biden administration brushes off this premise as a racist alt-right fever dream, the reality of that threat has come to affect everyday life for the average american. In its most recent whitewashing of the immigration crisis, the media establishment has all but entirely blacked out the murder Laken Riley, a 22-year old nursing student in Georgia. The lack of coverage about her murder is ostensibly because she was killed by an illegal immigrant who was able to enter the country due to the Biden administration's open-border policy.
Riley was a junior enrolled at the Augusta University, studying in its nursing school. University authorities' worst nightmares were realized when her body was discovered early Thursday afternoon following reports she had gone missing after going for a jog around the intramural sports fields 2.5 miles from the nearby University Of Georgia's main campus in Athens where she had been a student until 2023. Riley's body was identified by the Athens-Clarke County Coroner's office on Friday morning. The coroner assigned blunt force trauma as the cause of death, according to University Of Georgia Police Chief Jeff Clark during a statement made following the identification of Riley's body. During that announcement, Clark also announced that 26 year-old Venezuelan national Jose Antonio Ibarra had been arrested in connection with Riley's murder.
Ibarra's brother Diego was also arrested on Friday, though for charges unrelated to Riley's murder. Diego Ibarra was taken into state custody although charged federally for possession of a fraudulent green card, a crime that likely facilitated his brother's illegal immigration from Venezuela into the US where he took residence in Athens, GA. Diefo Ibarra was arrested for the fake green card when he presented it to police who asked to speak to him because he matched the description of the suspect in Riley's murder police took from campus security footage from where she went missing.
Friends, family, and the University Of Georgia mourned Riley's death, lauding the young woman for her academic excellence and exceptional character. “She received her honorary white coat in August of 2023, symbolizing humanism, compassion, and the start of her nurse’s journey,” the university remarked. “Not only was she a bright and dedicated student, but she had the distinct honor of making the Fall 2023 Dean’s List.” A close connection to the Riley family released a statement regarding Laken's death on their behalf which stated "Laken was an amazing daughter, sister, friend and overall person in general. Her love for the Lord was exemplified in every aspect of her life. She will be missed every day, but we promise to honor her life moving forward in a very big way," the statement read, going on to say "During this most difficult time, we ask that you respect our privacy, and provide us the time and space necessary to grieve our daughter’s life that was tragically cut short."
Subsequent to Ibarra's arrest, campus police have recommended he be charged with felony murder, false imprisonment, kidnapping, and concealing the death of another. Despite the litany of charges being sought and the gruesome nature of Riley's murder, police stated they believe that Ibarra's crime was an isolated incident and that he was not a suspect in any other on-going investigations in the area. Police described the murder as a crime of opportunity and said there was no evidence that Ibarra had any underlying motive or that he knew Riley beforehand. “The evidence suggests that this was a solo act,” Clark stated, adding there were “no indications of a continuing threat to the community related to this case at this time.”
Although the tragedy of Riley's murder is befitting of a true crime mystery series that Netflix would capitalize on in a heartbeat, her death has received little attention by their mainstream media cohorts. Despite the hours and hours of airtime dedicated to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others who died in 2020 as a means of launching the country onto the cusp of an all out race war, Riley's death defies mainstream narratives about the threat the US' open border with Mexico and is thus verboten from the same kind of coverage.
That media blackout obfuscates the reality that unfettered immigration into the US presents an innate threat to citizens. Since the 2021 fiscal year, Border Patrol has arrested 43,674 criminal non-citizens. US Customs And Border Protection defines the term criminal non-citizen as any individual who has been convicted of one or more crimes either in the US or abroad before behind interdicted by immigration officials. The metric also discounts criminal convictions abroad for crimes not illegal in the US. Of those 43,674 criminal non-citizens arrested, violent crimes accounted for over of their 8,000 preexisting convictions. Murder convictions related to 165 of those arrests, while sex crime convictions comprised nearly 10 times that amount with 1,210 having been documented by Border Patrol. Despite being on the books, these figures have received as little coverage by legacy media outlets as Riley's murder has.
Although the media establishment remains silent about the murder of Laken Riley, it can do little to silence the uproar against the Biden administration's manufactured immigration crisis. Even staunch supporters of the Democratic Party have come to express their disapproval of how the border is being handled amid approval ratings for Biden falling to all-time lows. What the coverage surrounding Riley's murder reflects is that there are no lengths the mainstream media will go to in order to push the political agenda fueling the immigration crisis, proving that innocent American lives are little more than political capital when it comes to pushing that agenda.