AP: Joe Biden Puts Laken Riley's Death 'Front and Center' in 2024 Race

President Joe Biden placed the alleged migrant murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley “front and center” in the 2024 campaign, the Associated Press (AP) reported in an article published by at least 75 media outlets around the nation.

The surprising admission by pro-migration AP was posted after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) prodded Biden to recognize the murder during his State of the Union speech. He responded by calling her by the wrong name, saying, “Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman, who was killed by an illegal.”

But Biden immediately dismissed the murder, which was enabled by his easy-migration policies, adding, “But how many thousands of people are killed by legals [residents]?”

The AP declared:

ATLANTA — With an unscripted clash between President Joe Biden and a Georgia congresswoman at Thursday night’s State of the Union speech, the slaying of a Georgia nursing student was further cemented as a political rallying point in the 2024 presidential race.

…

Immigration has [already] emerged as a major campaign issue, dividing the nation and straining resources in New York, Chicago, Boston and other cities after migrants settle there and in communities across the country after crossing the nation’s southern border.

Many Americans are murdered or killed by foreign migrants, but the establishment media rarely spotlight the deaths.

Greene posted on X about Biden’s response to her challenge to him at the State of the Union:

Biden’s political mistake was quickly recognized by many of the establishment media outlets, which usually prefer to stonewall Republican anger about the many crimes caused by Biden’s migrant wave.

The AP article did not mention the vast pocketbook and economic damage caused by Biden’s migration, which has spiked inflation, stalled wages, driven up housing prices, and shifted corporate investment away from high-tech productivity.

This rare media exposure of Biden’s error was greatly aided by his refusal to include any new proposals to curb the inflow of migrants. Instead, Biden rolled out the Democrats’ 2024 plan of blaming the GOP for Biden’s self-inflicted migration.

“I don’t know that he has any other option,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said. He continued:

I don’t think he has the political room to do something meaningful that would dramatically reduce the numbers. Even just using the word “illegal” for Laken Riley’s murderer got the left all in a tizzy. Imagine what would happen if he actually started enforcing immigration law? It would be like the Gaza pushback from the pro-Hamas elements within the Democratic Party, which, frankly, there’s a lot of overlap with the anti-borders elements. And the anti-borders people run immigration [policy] in this administration. … I mean, you would see resignations, open letters, and possibly, the inability to actually find a political appointee to carry out any new orders.

It’s the kind of [pushback] that could happen if the president were actually in charge of the administration, but Biden is a figurehead president. He’s clearly not in charge of what’s going on. In fact, nobody’s in charge. It seems like the chief of staff isn’t running the government, his wife isn’t running the government, and it doesn’t really look like anybody’s running things. It would take a decisive, energetic executive to put his foot down and tell people, “Do what I’m telling you, or hit the road.”

“The president is not that person,” he added.

When asked on Friday about his use of the word “illegals,” Biden said that “technically, he’s not supposed to be here”: