Illegal Immigrant Accused of Killing Laken Riley Was Paroled Illegally, DHS Records Show

Jose Antonio Ibarra was illegally out on parole when he allegedly killed Georgia student Laken Riley, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records.

The records were obtained by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who in disclosing them at a Judiciary Committee hearing on April 17 slammed DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for telling the committee the day before that he didn’t know why Mr. Ibarra had been paroled from the federally run immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas.

“It’s in your own file!” exclaimed Mr. Graham, a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee on April 17. “How can you testify before the country you didn’t know how the guy got into the country, when literally at the same moment I’m giving you a document he was admitted into the country for lack of capacity at El Paso?”

The condemnation hours before the Senate kicked off the impeachment trial of Mr. Mayorkas on allegations that he is not ensuring the upholding of immigration laws including the longstanding Immigration and Nationality Act, which sets detention mandates for inadmissible aliens in the United States.

According to Mr. Graham, one of those violations was the paroling of Mr. Ibarra.

The DHS records that he obtained state that Mr. Ibarra was granted “parole due to detention capacity.”

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“The law is clear. You cannot parole someone because you don’t have space,” Mr. Graham said. He included as part of his testimony a blowup of the excerpt from DHS records citing lack of space as the reason for Mr. Ibarra’s parole.

By law, Mr. Graham pointed out, immigration parole is to be granted only at the discretion of the DHS Secretary on a case-by-case basis, in instances of “urgent humanitarian reason or significant public benefit.”

“If this is not Exhibit A of a broken immigration system, what would be?” he asked.

DHS did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about the case.

Mr. Graham’s testimony along with other documents show that after Mr. Ibarra was paroled in 2022, he was subsequently arrested in 2023 and released at least three separate times for various crimes before allegedly killing Ms. Riley.

The first time was in September 2023 by police in New York on allegations of endangering a minor under the age of 17 and committing a motor vehicle violation.

He was arrested again in October 2023 on shoplifting and other theft charges by police in Athens, Georgia.

In December 2023, he was arrested on a bench warrant for failing to appear in court on the previous charges.

It would be less than two months later, in what would be his fourth arrest, that the Venezuelan native would be arrested for the murder of Ms. Riley. The body of the 22-year-old Augusta University student, a known avid runner who reportedly always made the dean’s list, was found on Feb. 23 on a wooded trail located in an area on campus that was just a mile from where Mr. Ibarra was staying.

According to police affidavits, she was so badly beaten that her skull was disfigured. In the affidavits, Mr. Ibarra is accused of kidnapping Ms. Riley, dragging her into the woods, and then bludgeoning her to death.

The 26-year-old Mr. Ibarra, who has required a translator in court proceedings, recently requested a jury trial in the case through his court-appointed attorneys.

His older brother, who is currently being detained at an immigration facility on various crimes including running a fake green card scam, has been linked by federal prosecutors to the notorious and violent Tren de Aragua gang.

Mr. Graham is not the first congressional leader to inquire about the questionable immigration standards followed in Jose Ibarra’s case.

The two Republicans also recently spearheaded a congressional investigation into an alleged gag order instituted by the Department of Justice against immigration judges that forbids them from speaking with Congress and the news media about what they called “the Biden Administration’s unprecedented immigration crisis.”

“The reported gag order on immigration judges appears to violate federal law that guarantees the right of all federal employees to speak freely with Congress without interference from their employer,” the lawmakers wrote in an inquiry on the subject to Executive Office for Immigration Review Director David Neal. “It is striking that the Biden Administration seeks to stifle the free speech of immigration judges at a time when the House of Representatives is conducting robust oversight of the border crisis and how the nation’s immigration courts are being used to carry out President Biden’s open-borders policies.”

In his inquest into Mr. Ibarra’s illegal parole, Mr. Graham feverishly denounced Democrats for balking at reform efforts of Biden’s border policies.

“We’re going to have an impeachment trial on Mayorkas, in theory, but not in practice,” he said. “We’re not going to get any of this information because … you don’t want to have a discussion as to whether or not he has broken his duty to protect America … but the issue is not going to go away.

“We’re going to tell the American people until we run out of breath that the system in place is broken.”