U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday, Mar. 9, that he regretted using the term "illegal" during his State of the Union Address to describe Jose Ibarra, the suspected murderer of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
He made the statement after facing frustration from some in the Democratic Party for the use of the term to describe people who arrived or are living in the United States illegally.
"I shouldn't have used illegal, it's undocumented," Biden told MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart in a taped interview in Atlanta, where he was meeting with small business owners and holding a campaign rally.
In response, former US President Donald Trump criticized Biden's immigration policies and blamed them for her death at a rally attended by Riley's family and friends on the same day in Rome, Georgia, telling her family that he shares their grief.
"Joe Biden went on television and apologized for calling Laken's murderer an illegal," he said to loud jeers and boos. "Biden should be apologizing for apologizing to this killer."
Riley's murder became the newest flashpoint in the 2024 US election campaign, as well as becoming a rallying cry for Republicans who have seized on frustrations over the Biden administration's handling of the US-Mexico border amid a record surge of migrants entering the country, the Associated Press reported.
"What Joe Biden has done on our border is a crime against humanity and the people of this nation for which he will never be forgiven," Trump added, alleging that Riley "would be alive today if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country."
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Weaponizing Riley's Murder
Trump has been using immigration as the central issue of his campaign, repeatedly vowing to mount the largest deportation in the nation's history if he wins.
Earlier this year, Biden bucked activists within his party by agreeing to make changes to US immigration law that would have limited some migration.
The deal that emerged would have overhauled the asylum system to provide faster and tougher enforcement and given presidents new powers to immediately expel migrants if authorities become overwhelmed. It also would have added $20 billion in funding.
The changes became part of a short-lived bipartisan compromise that was quickly rejected by Republican lawmakers after Trump made his opposition known.
In addition to Trump using Riley's death as a weapon to promote very strict immigration crackdowns, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) demanded Biden to "Say her name!" during Thursday's Mar. 7 State of the Union.
The phrase was first popularized by civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 2015 following the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was found dead in a Texas jail cell a few days after she was arrested during a traffic stop.
The hashtag #SayHerName became more popular in 2020 after Black women were allegedly killed due to police brutality post-George Floyd.
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