Alejandro Mayorkas rejects Republican claim that Biden’s immigration policy is to blame for death of nursing student in Georgia: ‘One individual is responsible for the murder and that is the murderer’

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday rejected the claim that President Joe Biden’s immigration policy is responsible for the death of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley.

Riley was brutally murdered while out for a run last month, and her body was found in a wooded area near campus in Athens, Georgia.

His alleged murderer, José Antonio Ibarra, was illegally in the United States and had committed crimes in other states.

That fact has been a rallying cry for conservatives, including former President Donald Trump, who believe the Biden administration has mishandled the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“One individual is responsible for the murder and that is the murderer,” Mayorkas said during an interview on Face the Nation on Sunday.

The embattled DHS secretary, who was impeached by the House of Representatives last month, called Riley’s death an “absolute tragedy” when asked by CBS’s Margaret Brennan whether Ibarra should have been deported.

“And our hearts are broken and our prayers are with the family,” Mayorkas said.

The DHS secretary said his federal agency “work(s) very closely with state and local authorities to ensure that individuals who pose a threat to public safety are indeed our top priority for detention and removal.”

He went on to insist on why that didn’t happen in Ibarra’s case.

“There are several cities across the country that have varying degrees of cooperation with immigration authorities,” he responded.

“We firmly believe that if a city is aware of an individual who poses a threat to public safety, then we will request that they provide us with that information so that we can ensure that individual is detained if the facts warrant it,” Mayorkas added. .

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the suspect had been arrested in September by the New York Police Department for “acting in a manner likely to injure a child.”

The NYPD would not confirm that part of the story, telling the local Fox affiliate that there were no arrests on record for Ibarra.

U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement said Ibarra entered the country illegally near El Paso, Texas, in September 2022 and was released for further processing after initially being detained.

Brennan said it seemed as if, in this case, the feds and New York City were not coordinating.

‘Well, cities have different levels of cooperation. In this case we were not notified,” she said.