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Jarrett Stepman (The Daily Signal)
Violent crime is going down in Venezuela just as the United States has been hit with a rash of high-profile violent crimes by illegal immigrants.
It’s not hard to figure out why.
The killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Athens, Georgia, has become the latest and most prominent case of an American being killed as a consequence of President Joe Biden’s open-border policies.
The man being held in connection with the killing of Riley is Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal immigrant who reportedly entered the United States in 2022. Since his arrival in the U.S., he appears to have spent his time breaking various other laws and behaving like a general menace to society. He has been arrested for various serious crimes and repeatedly released.
Now, a young American woman is dead.
Here’s how Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—who has been impeached by the House—described the responsibility for the killing.
“As a prosecutor, having prosecuted violent crime and other crimes for 12 years, one individual is responsible for the murder, and that is the murderer,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
That’s not at all how the Left typically talks about crime—as an account on X, formerly Twitter, pointed out.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., didn’t mince words about the cause of this evil: “Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas have blood on their hands for every single American murdered by an illegal alien. They need to do their jobs and secure our border before more innocent Americans are killed.”
Riley’s death is certainly not the only case of a serious crime being connected to the unrestrained immigration and border issue. Fox News reporter Bill Melugin lamented on X that it’s getting hard to keep up with all the stories about illegal immigrants committing violent crimes.
While left-wing media twist and turn to hide the source of illegal immigrant crimes and portray “asylum-seekers” as just innocent refugees, the reality seems to be that a potentially large number of dangerous criminals have been allowed to enter and remain in the United States.
A news report from December is a pretty good indicator of what’s driving this uptick in criminality.
“Venezuela’s rate of violent deaths dropped to its lowest level in more than two decades following years of massive migration, as both criminals and victims fled the nation’s economic crisis,” Bloomberg reported in late December.
According to Bloomberg, Venezuela “registered 26.8 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants” in 2023, down from 35.3 for every 100,000 the year before.
Last year’s figure is “one-third of what it was in 2016.”
Good for Venezuela, I guess.
But the socialist country didn’t come up with new crime-fighting tricks or round up all the gangs like El Salvador did. No, what’s happened is Venezuelan criminals have simply pulled up stakes and left the failing nation for greener pastures.
Remember how Vice President Kamala Harris, the “border czar,” spoke about how fixing the border issue was about fixing the problems in Central and South America? Apparently, what she meant by that is that we’d just bring all of their crime issues here. Problem solved!
It’s a bit reminiscent of how Fidel Castro’s regime in Havana sent thousands of convicts to the United States from Cuba in 1980, the final year of the Carter administration. Is Venezuela intentionally sending criminals over to the U. S.? So far, there’s no direct evidence of that, but the Caracas regime of strongman Nicolas Maduro is preventing Venezuelan illegal immigrants from being sent back.
“Venezuela has followed through on a threat to stop accepting flights of migrants deported from the U.S. and Mexico,” The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
The Journal reported that “President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian regime introduced the measure after Washington reimposed some of the economic sanctions it had previously lifted on Venezuela.”
An estimated more than half a million Venezuelans have illegally crossed the southern border in the past two years. How many of those people are dangerous, violent criminals? Will the Biden administration and blue, Democrat-run cities even do anything about the ones who have proved to be a danger?
According to the latest estimates, at least 7.2 million people have come into the country during the Biden presidency. And because this migration is on such a mass scale and all but unregulated, it’s impossible to weed out all the violent criminals.
If the Biden administration had focused on actually securing the border and ensuring that people couldn’t come into the country illegally to begin with, this wouldn’t be a problem. But now it is, and given the scope of the border crisis, this is now a much more widespread issue than what Miami faced in the 1980s.
This is all the result of the self-inflicted, ideologically motivated destruction that’s become a hallmark of the Biden presidency. The Left gets mass, unrestricted illegal immigration, and we pay the price.
