A nation enriched by legal immigrants now buckles from weight of illegal crossers and their crimes

A nursing student bludgeoned to death near a tranquil Georgia college campus. A developmentally disabled person raped in Boston. A mother and son killed in a head-on crash in Colorado. New York’s finest assaulted in the heralded Times Square.

The roll-call of victims violated by Joe Biden’s border policies is rising as fast as the hotel and welfare tabs for sanctuary cities, thrusting an American society that long revered its immigrant heritage into a crisis of epic proportions driven by more than 8 million illegal border crossers since the 46th president took office.

That total surpasses the individual populations of more than half the republic’s states. And the impact by state and city becomes more staggering by the day.

Much of Texas – 53 counties and counting – has declared it is under invasion from illegal aliens. States a thousand or more miles from the southern border are dispatching precious police and National Guard resources to the Lone Star state to try to reinforce lines abandoned by the U.S. government.

Students have been displaced from a New York school to make room for illegal immigrants, while American veterans languish in longer lines so the VA can process health claims for noncitizens who have tried to jump the lawful entry line to America.

A majority of Americans now say the last few years of border policy and history are the very definition of insanity, polling shows. While not a single state that touches the southern border has held its 2024 presidential primary yet, immigration has finished as the top issue of concern in exit polls of GOP primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

No survey or statistic can aptly summarize the toll better than the stories of Americans lost to tragic crimes committed by those the Biden administration has allowed to cross the border through “catch and release” or now a new parole status that comes with a high-tech app.

Here are just a few cases that have shocked the nation:

• Haitian national Pierre Lucard Emile was arrested in January on charges that he raped a developmentally disabled person in Boston. Emile entered the U.S. through Brownsville, Texas, in December 2022, and was simply released into the country with a “Notice to Appear” despite being deemed inadmissible. Even after he was arrested for the rape last September, he was freed for a time because local authorities in the sanctuary city ignored an ICE retainer. Eventually, federal agents captured him.
• An alleged illegal immigrant named Jose Santiago Chairez was arrested in December in Dallas on charges he fatally shot two sisters in their home and wounding his own daughter.
• Jose Guadalupe Menjivar-Alas from El Salvador was charged with driving drunk when he struck a vehicle in Broomfield, Colo., killing the mother who was driving and her 16-year-old son. The illegal immigrant reportedly had been deported from the country four times between 2009 and 2014 but managed to enter again.
• Honduran national Carlos Corrales-Ramirez was charged with stabbing to death a man in Troy, New York. When he was arrested, federal officials say, they discovered that he was also wanted in Laurel, Md., for another stabbing.

The freshest example emerged this weekend in Athens, Ga., where authorities arrested Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal alien from Venezuela, in connection with the murder of nursing student Laken Riley near the University of Georgia campus. She was bludgeoned to death while on a morning jog, police said.

U.S. immigration records reviewed by Just the News show that Ibarra entered the United States in 2022 and was flagged for illegal entry and removal. A year later he was given parole under the Biden administration’s new policy and provided a work permit, the records show.

He also was arrested in New York in 2023, but freed before he could be deported, according to federal immigration officials.  

The case renewed and galvanized national attention, forcing Georgia’s GOP governor, Brian Kemp, to send a stinging letter demanding his administration tell each state the whereabouts of every illegal alien it has allowed to stay in the country.

“The American people deserve to know who is illegally entering our country due to your administration’s failures and what risks and challenges every state must now face,” Kemp declared in the letter.

Ibarra’s older brother was also arrested and charged with possessing a fake green card, according to Kemp’s letter. The governor noted to Biden that the older brother had been arrested multiple times in the past on charges ranging from driving under the influence to shoplifting but had “been released back into the community while his asylum claims are being processed.”

Members of Congress like Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., have reached a boiling point, insisting that the Biden administration's border policies coupled with liberal cities’ sanctuary city policies were responsible for Riley’s death.

"The blood of Laken Riley is on the hands of Joe Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the government of Athens-Clarke County," Collins wrote on the social platform X. "The Venezuelan suspect in Laken Riley's murder is one of millions of illegal aliens that the Biden administration has released into this country to be welcomed with open arms by Democrat-run sanctuary jurisdictions. Athens has declared itself, a “sanctuary city,” although Georgia state lawmakers outlawed sanctuary cities in 2009.

“This man had no business being in America, much less the UGA community to brutally murder this young American while she was on a run,” he said.

Democrats note Republicans turned down a Senate bipartisan bill on immigration weeks ago (saying they did so because it would still allow up to 5,000 illegal entries a day) and pleaded not to politicize Riley’s death.

"Laken Riley's family deserves space to grieve without being used for cheap political points,” Georgia state Sen. Jason Esteves, a Democrat, wrote on X.

After months of withering criticism, President Joe Biden has said he is open to making “massive changes” on immigration including reported tightening to asylum rules. As of Sunday the 46th president had not reacted publicly to Riley’s death.

America has faced prior surges of illegal aliens at its border, as far back as four decades ago with Cuban refugees. Back then, President Ronald Reagan made clear inaction was not an option.

“Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands,” Reagan stated in July 1981. “No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all those who seek a better life or flee persecution. We must share this responsibility with other countries.”

But Reagan said the key to that responsibility was being able to “insure adequate legal authority to establish control over immigration.”