“The Daily,” a podcast platformed by the New York Times, downplayed the spike in murders caused by illegal immigrants following the conviction of 22-year-old Laken Riley’s murderer.

Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard convicted Jose Ibarra, an illegal migrant from Venezuela, of all ten counts at the conclusion of the trial and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. The Times’ Atlanta bureau chief Rick Rojas said that Riley’s murder outside of the University of Georgia’s campus is “not reflective” of illegal immigrants’ intentions and suggested that Republicans are highlighting this murder to spew their anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“This is very clearly an aberration. What Jose Ibarra is accused of doing is in no way reflective of the intentions or the actions of the vast majority of the people who are undocumented and who enter the United States,” Rojas said. “Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. That this is a population that is doing everything they can to avoid detection, to keep their head down, their intention is not to come here and sow unrest and perpetrate violence, it’s really to get away from something else and seek economic opportunity. And so, while this case is very much real, it’s not necessarily an indictment of undocumented people more broadly. But President [Donald] Trump and other conservatives have highlighted this case because it so neatly makes the point that they want to make even if the evidence more broadly doesn’t bear this out.”

Several outlets such as The Washington Post, CBS News, and The Associated Press did not specify in their headlines that Ibarra is an illegal immigrant. The Post, The New York Times and other left-leaning outlets reported that Republicans have invoked Riley’s name to attack the Biden administration’s border policies and to highlight crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

Ibarra unlawfully entered the U.S. through an entryway near El Paso, Texas, and was released into the country on parole due to the lack of detention space at the time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed. The agency found that Ibarra was also arrested for allegedly acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 years old in New York City.

His former roommate, Rosbeli Elisber Flores-Bello, testified Monday that they later traveled from New York City to Athens, Georgia, after requesting a “humanitarian flight” in September 2023, four months before Riley’s murder.

Violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants have garnered national attention throughout President Joe Biden’s administration, as border encounters consistently surpassed a record of 2 million since he assumed office in January 2021. An illegal immigrant named Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, who illegally enter the U.S., allegedly raped and murdered 37-year-old Rachel Morin, a mother of five, in June. He previously committed a murder in El Salvador.

Two Venezuelan nationals who illegally entered the U.S. sexually assaulted and strangled 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in July before dumping her corpse in a nearby creek in Houston, Texas. Her mother, Alexis, blamed the Biden-Harris administration’s catch-and-release programs for her daughter’s death during an Oct. 18 interview with Fox News, which allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “parole” migrants instead of detaining them for “humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

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Nicole Silverio

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