Dem surrogate for Biden claims it's 'racist' to call out crimes committed by illegal immigrants

While campaigning for Joe Biden on Wednesday ahead of the president's visit to the southern border, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia took aim at those who have drawn attention to the number of, often violent, crimes recently committed by illegal immigrants.

The California congressman suggested that it was "racist" to merely point out the trend, and parroted the claim that immigrants, including those who entered the United States illegally, commit fewer crimes than those born in the country.
 

"Immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than native-born people here in this country," Garcia said on the press briefing call. "This immigrant crime narrative is racist. It's not true."

He went on to take aim at Donald Trump for suggesting illegal immigrants were "poisoning the blood of this country," adding, "the facts actually don't bear that out."

While data shows that illegal immigrants do, on average, commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens after entering the country, many have pointed out that while that may be true, it is also true that every offense carried out by an illegal immigrant is 100 percent preventable, since they should not have made it across the border in the first place.

Garcia's comments come following a series of violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants across the United States. Several Venezuelan gang members, for example, have been charged with brutally beating NYPD officers in Times Square and committing robberies, and in January, an El Salvadoran national allegedly killed a mother and her son during a car crash that involved alcohol in Broomfield, Colorado.

The case that has arguably done the most to bring the issue to the forefront, however, is the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student.

Illegal immigrant Jose Antonio Ibarra was charged with malice murder, murder, kidnapping, false imprisonment, aggravated assault, aggravated battery and concealing the death of another after Riley's body was found at the University of Georgia campus in Athens.

"The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened!" Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. "The monster who took her life illegally entered our Country in 2022...and then was released AGAIN by Radical Democrats in New York after injuring a CHILD!!"