Say her name: The Laken Riley case and presidential politics

The murder was a direct result of Biden’s border policy. Under the president’s administration, U.S. border officials did nothing to turn Ibarra away and instead bent over backward to accommodate him and millions of other unvetted illegal border crossers. 

On Wednesday, Ibarra was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The trial, televised on news networks, was an especially heartbreaking scene during victim impact statements, when Riley’s sister, her mother and father, and her close friends told the court how dear she had been to them. Many in the courtroom, and probably in the television audience, too, were in tears as they recounted the joy that Riley brought to her family and to others.

Apart from the human tragedy, the courtroom scene showed how politically powerful the Riley case and the broader issue of migrant crime had been in the recent presidential election. Back in March, before the State of the Union address, Biden and top administration officials had pretty much ignored the case. That is why Greene wanted Biden to know about Laken Riley.

As Biden spoke, Greene shouted, “Say her name!” Biden responded by mentioning the case, but he mangled Riley’s name — he called her “Lincoln” — and then angered his own progressive Democratic supporters when he ad-libbed that Riley had been killed by “an illegal.” To quote a National Public Radio story from that night, “Some Democrats criticized the president for using ‘illegal’ as a noun to describe a person, saying he was adopting rhetoric on the Right that dehumanizes undocumented immigrants.”

Biden later apologized for saying “illegal.” “An undocumented person — I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’” he told MSNBC three days after the speech. That just made things worse. Here so many in Georgia were mourning the entirely unnecessary loss of a young and vital life, and Biden was worrying about offending the killer by using a less-than-politically-correct term.

Candidate Donald Trump mentioned Riley’s name often in his campaign appearances. He also noted other, similarly terrible, cases of illegal border crossers killing Americans and committing other crimes. Trump promised a border crackdown, and everybody knew he would do it because, in his first term, he enormously reduced the number of illegal crossers and ended the policy of allowing them to stay in the U.S. while their cases were adjudicated. Polls showed many voters saw the border as, after the economy, the second-most important issue at stake in the election.

All Vice President Kamala Harris could do was try to blame Republicans for the mess she and Biden had made of the border and pretend that she would be tough on the border if elected president in her own right. Nobody believed it.

In a political sense, the Ibarra trial, verdict, and sentencing was a kind of terrible coda to the election: This is what Trump and Republicans were talking about. Apart from the awful sadness of it all, the Riley case showed both the appalling consequences of an open border and why the issue was important for so many millions of voters.