Three years ago, a 25-year-old Honduran national named Medina Ulloa was stopped by border patrol agents in Texas. He gave them a fake name and lied about being a juvenile. But instead of kicking him out of the country, authorities gave him a “notice to appear” for a court date that everyone knew he’d never actually attend. Then Ulloa was flown to Jacksonville, Florida, where he was taken in by a 46-year-old father of four. Soon afterwards, the immigrant beat the man to death inside his own home.
Last year, Medina Ulloa pleaded guilty to murder and received a 60-year sentence. And during the course of the prosecution that led to that plea deal, we learned a lot of details about what happened. We learned Ulloa had attempted to tamper with evidence, for example. We also learned from home security footage that Medina Ulloa pummeled his victim with a chair before repeatedly stabbing him.
But there was one critical detail that was never explained, even though it’s maybe the most important one in the entire story: How did Medina Ulloa get to Jacksonville? Did he buy a ticket himself, even though he had no money? Did someone else buy a ticket for him? Or did Medina Ulloa arrive in Jacksonville on one of the Biden administration’s secret resettlement flights, which take off in the middle of the night and ferry thousands of illegal aliens from Texas to destinations all over the country — including Jacksonville?
In this case, the victim’s daughter claimed that Ulloa had indeed arrived on one of these resettlement flights. And she would have reason to know that. Again, her father had allowed this guy into his home, and presumably they talked about how he had arrived in Jacksonville in the first place. But for their part, the Biden-Harris administration has refused to say anything about the arrangement, one way or another. Even when a Republican congressman formally asked the Biden administration to explain exactly what had happened, they didn’t confirm or deny that they had flown Ulloa into Jacksonville.
Of course, that almost certainly means they did, indeed, put him on one of their many charter jets for illegal aliens. Therefore, when Ulloa committed murder, the DHS knew they were complicit. Their policy had facilitated a brutal killing. And so they decided not to talk about it. That was their solution. The federal government, under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, apparently decided that they’d rather cover up their role in a homicide, instead of taking action to prevent future homicides from occurring.
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So it’s not surprising that those homicides have continued to occur, in similar fashion. As you may have heard, the trial of 26-year-old Venezuelan illegal alien Jose Ibarra got underway this week in Athens, Georgia. Ibarra is accused of murdering Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, near a jogging trail at the University of Georgia back in February. Prosecutors say Ibarra put on a hoodie-style jacket, a black hat, and black disposable gloves, before going off to “hunt for females” on the university’s campus.
What we didn’t know until yesterday is how exactly Ibarra got to Georgia in the first place. The government certainly didn’t bother to tell us. But during the trial yesterday, we learned the answer to that question. According to Ibarra’s roommate, just like Medina Ulloa, he received a taxpayer-funded resettlement flight. In the case of Ibarra, the flight took him from New York City to Georgia.
In other words, the Biden-Harris administration didn’t just enable the murder of Laken Riley with their lax border policies, they also facilitated the murder. Watch:
The roommate of Laken Riley's killer just testified during his trial that they went to the Roosevelt Hotel together in September 2023 and received a taxpayer funded flight to Georgia.
Your government flew an illegal gang member to Georgia with your money — where he then… pic.twitter.com/7plVTnJhy6
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 18, 2024
If we had a “Department of Homeland Security” that actually cared about securing the homeland, we wouldn’t be hearing about this now, months after the fact (and weeks after the election). We’d have heard about it back in February.
The government would have acknowledged that they paid the airfare for a murderer. There would have been months of congressional hearings by now. We’d know every detail about how exactly this brutal killer was ferried throughout the country, at taxpayer expense. Instead, the Biden-Harris administration refused to say a word about this. It fell to a local prosecutor in Georgia to reveal that the federal government was covering this criminal’s airfare.
This is especially egregious when you consider the DHS knew that Ibarra was a member of one of the most dangerous gangs on the planet. The New York Post and NewsNation have confirmed that, according to DHS sources, Jose Ibarra was a member of “Tren de Aragua.” If you’re keeping track, that’s the same gang that’s taken over several apartment complexes in Colorado.
And this is the person they were paying to transport across the United States. It makes you wonder how many of those Colorado gang members were transported, for free, from the southern border.
It also makes you wonder when we can expect criminal trials for the DHS officials who allowed this to happen. They were transporting a criminal that they knew — or should have known — was a member of a violent, transnational criminal organization. How is that any different from offering, say, a member of ISIS a free one-way ticket to Manhattan? At a certain point, you can’t pretend to be surprised at the natural and foreseeable consequences of government policy. When you facilitate the transportation of dangerous criminals who are members of notoriously brutal gangs, you don’t get to feign astonishment when they go on to commit brutal crimes.
And it’s not as if Ibarra wasn’t sending up red flags left and right, even apart from his gang ties. After the Biden administration let him into the country in September of 2022 (supposedly due to a “lack of bed space,” which doesn’t seem particularly relevant since we don’t need bed space to deport him), Ibarra somehow arrived in New York City. Once there, local officials put him up in the swanky Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. While there, he had access to free healthcare, housing, meals and even legal services, to help him prepare his fraudulent asylum application.
But that wasn’t enough to keep Ibarra out of trouble. In August of 2023, Ibarra was arrested in New York for “acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17.” He was also hit with a “vehicle license violation.” That’s according to DHS officials. But the local DA, Alvin Bragg, was too busy prosecuting the leading presidential candidate for an ancient business records violation, so he couldn’t be bothered to prosecute Ibarra, or give a heads-up to federal immigration authorities. So Ibarra was released quickly without any bond.
Then Ibarra headed to another sanctuary city (thanks to the Biden administration’s resettlement flight) — Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. On October 27, he was given a citation for shoplifting. Under the Left-wing DA’s policies, Ibarra wasn’t arrested for the offense at the time. Instead, he was ordered to appear for a court hearing in December. But Ibarra ignored that hearing, of course, so an arrest warrant was issued on December 20th.
But he was never arrested. For months, he wasn’t bothered by local authorities or by Biden’s DHS, despite all of the crimes he committed in this country — and despite an active arrest warrant.
He wasn’t bothered in any way until February, when he put on his disposable gloves and murdered Laken Riley. And as the prosecutor outlined today, it was a vicious, brutal killing. Riley fought for 18 minutes, up until the point her smartwatch recorded that her heart had stopped:
Prosecutor lays out the horrific manner in which Jose Ibarra brutally murdered Laken Riley
He bashed her skull in repeatedly with a rock after she put up a fight to the very end
There is forensic, digital and video evidence pic.twitter.com/uXWTd7y66A
— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) November 15, 2024
One of the many ways that investigators were able to tie Ibarra to this crime is that, just hours before he killed Riley, he posted photos of himself on Snapchat. In those photos, he was wearing a black Adidas hat, a blue jacket, and a black-and-white shirt.
And then, after the killing, a man wearing the same clothing was captured on a Ring-style camera discarding a blue jacket into a dumpster. And when that jacket was tested, it contained Laken Riley’s DNA. Watch:
🚨This is horrifying but necessary to watch:
Jose Ibarra — the illegal alien animal who murdered Laken Riley — is seen on surveillance video dumping clothes into a dumpster shortly after Laken’s heart stopped.
We don’t have to live like this.
It’s time to secure our border. pic.twitter.com/f3fmzprdWS
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) November 15, 2024
This country endured a year of rioting over George Floyd, costing billions of dollars and leading to the deaths of several Americans. Police stations and churches were torched, federal courthouses were attacked, small businesses were destroyed. Members of Congress wore “kente cloth” and got down on one knee. It was all in service of a lie that Floyd’s death was the result of systemic injustice, instead of his own decisions — and in particular, his decision to spend his life committing serious crimes, culminating in an attempt to defraud a business while high on enough fentanyl to kill a horse.
The murder of Laken Riley, on the other hand, was the result of systemic injustice. The government provided her killer access to this country, in violation of the law. Then the government gave him free housing, meals and airfare to go wherever he wanted — which is very common, by the way. As House investigators found earlier this year, more than 50 airports have been used by DHS to transport more than 400,000 illegal aliens in this manner since January of last year. More than a million illegals are on the waiting list.
And the government did all of this without putting it up for a vote, or asking whether Americans wanted this to happen — even though, overwhelmingly, they don’t. And then, after one of these illegal aliens brutally murders a nursing student, the president of the United States finally apologized — but not to the victim, or her family. Instead, he apologized for calling the killer an “illegal” during the State of the Union, after mispronouncing Laken Riley’s name. Here’s that again, to refresh our memories:
When Biden made that apology, he knew that Riley’s death could’ve been prevented several times, in several different cities. His DHS knew that they had assisted the perpetrator of this heinous crime, several times over. But the only apology that Biden could muster was to criminals like Jose Ibarra. He said illegal aliens “built this county,” which doesn’t even begin to make sense. He didn’t say a word about the role of these secret resettlement flights in causing Laken Riley’s death, maybe because he was hoping we’d never find out about it.
But now we have found out about it, thanks to testimony from the killer’s roommate (who incidentally, is also in the country illegally). This is what the open-borders agenda means in practice. We’re once again seeing how a policy that’s supposedly premised on “compassion” for illegal immigrants, in reality, translates into brutality and death for American citizens.
That’s been obvious to most people on the Right for a while. But now it’s getting hard for anyone to ignore. That’s why the exit polls showed Kamala Harris losing on the immigration issue, across party lines. The vast majority of Americans recognize at this point that we shouldn’t be flying these illegal aliens throughout the country in the middle of the night, or any other time of day. We should be flying them out of the country, back to wherever they came from.
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That’s what the incoming Trump administration is promising to do. And unlike the Biden administration, the new administration isn’t going to hide these flights. The new border czar is openly promoting them already — and why shouldn’t he? Enforcing the law is overwhelmingly popular. It’s what Americans want. When you’re implementing a policy that’s actually popular, you don’t need to do it under the cover of darkness. You can talk about it on cable news, which is exactly what Trump’s nominees are doing.
This is a change that, as this trial in Georgia demonstrates, can’t come soon enough. With the killing of Laken Riley, months after the fact, we have discovered that the U.S. government was effectively an accomplice to the murder of an American citizen. They didn’t just create the conditions that allowed this killing to happen by opening the border. They also facilitated the killing by providing repeated, material support to the murderer. And then they tried to cover it up.
And by the way, six Republican senators voted to confirm the DHS secretary who oversaw all of this. That’s something to keep in mind as the Trump Cabinet appointments make their way through the Senate. Any senator who voted for Alejandro Mayorkas should explain that vote. And those senators — the ones who are still in office, anyway — should explain what they plan to do, going forward, to dismantle the open-borders agenda, instead of enabling it.
The murder of Laken Riley makes it very clear that this change is long overdue. Once the killer is brought to justice in Georgia, all of his many enablers in the government should also be held to account. That’s the only way to prevent a murder like this from happening again. And it’s the only way to ensure that Americans can have any trust in their government going forward. This is the radical reform that Americans voted for. Before the next woman like Laken Riley is killed, we need to enact it.
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