What’s in a word, one may ask. It appears a lot.
When President Joe Biden spoke Thursday during his State of the Union address, he said Laken Riley was “killed by an illegal,” Mediaite reported.
However, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Biden should have referred to the suspect as “undocumented” instead.
“Now he should have said undocumented, but that’s not a big thing, OK? What’s the big thing?” Pelosi said in response to a question posed by CNN anchor Dana Bash.
Bash had started to ask, “Madam speaker, one of the clearly ad-libbed moments was during the section about immigration,” Mediaite reported.
She then played a clip of Biden, who referred to Riley as “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.”
But before Bash could ask her question, Pelosi interrupted with her take on Biden saying “illegal “ instead of “undocumented.”
But that wasn’t what Bash was going to ask.
“I actually wasn’t even gonna ask about that,” said Bash. “I was just gonna ask more about the moment. But you do think that he should have said undocumented? That wasn’t going to be my question.”
Pelosi responded, “Well, we usually say ‘undocumented.’ He said ‘illegal.’ I don’t think it’s a big deal. I don’t think it’s a big deal because I think his focus was on the sympathy for the family. It’s a terrible tragedy.”
Pelosi’s response came after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke out during the address while Biden was talking, ABC News reported.
Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered in February while running on the campus of the University of Georgia. The suspect is a migrant from Venezuela whom officials say was in the U.S. illegally, per ABC News.
“Laken Riley,” Biden said, appearing to mispronounce her name as Lincoln, “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.”
Buttons with the words “Say her name, Laken Riley” were distributed before the SOTU.
The GOP feels Biden has avoided the murder and saying Riley’s name “so as not to highlight the crime and the suspect,” per ABC.
“To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself. I understand,” he said.
The House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act. This would “require detention of any unauthorized migrant who commits burglary or theft,” per the outlet.
Jose Antonio Ibarra, the suspect in Riley’s murder, unlawfully entered the U.S. near El Paso, Texas, in September 2022.
He and was paroled and released for further processing, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.