Former President Bill Clinton was ostensibly campaigning on Monday in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, when he -- perhaps unwittingly -- threw her under the bus on the issue of illegal immigration.

Clinton referenced the high-profile murder in February of college student Laken Riley by an illegal migrant and said the slaying "probably wouldn't have happened" if the suspect had been "properly vetted" before being allowed entry in 2022, the Daily Mail reported.

Of course, Clinton attempted to shift blame for the tragedy to former President Donald Trump's efforts to block an immigration reform bill, but that bill was introduced two years after Riley's unvetted killer entered the country under the Biden-Harris regime's watch and likely would have failed even without Trump's state opposition.

If Laken Riley's killer had "been properly vetted," her death "probably wouldn't have happened"

Former President Clinton was campaigning on behalf of VP Harris in Georgia on Monday when he raised the issue of illegal immigration and then tried to claim that Harris would do a better job on handling that issue than her Republican opponent, former President Trump.

Clinton asserted that Harris "is the only candidate who has actually endorsed a bill that would hold down immigration in any given year to a certain point, and then made sure we gave people a decent place to live, didn't divide people from their children. And we did total vetting before people got in."

"Now, Trump killed the bill," he continued. "The bill was written -- being written by senior Republicans in the Senate. And he killed the bill. Why?"

"You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn't you, they made an ad about it, about a young woman who'd been killed by an immigrant," Clinton added. "Yeah, well, if they'd all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn't have happened."

This clip has been edited to exclude what former President Clinton said before he made these remarks.

Here’s the full clip with context where Clinton notes that Trump killed an immigration bill that was led by senior Republicans in the US Senate. https://t.co/hVmY9FIDSM pic.twitter.com/lS8TG7hlRe

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 14, 2024

Clinton's comments seized upon by Trump campaign

The Trump campaign wasted no time in highlighting former President Clinton's remarks about the murder of Laken Riley and how it could have been prevented by the proper and thorough vetting of migrants who are let into the country.

It pointed out that Riley's accused killer, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela named Jose Ibarra, had been caught at the border but was processed and released under the Biden-Harris administration's lax enforcement policies in 2022.

The campaign further highlighted that, if re-elected, Trump would work immediately to "secure the border and stop catch-and-release," which is why, the campaign claimed, the former GOP president was just endorsed by the Border Patrol Union.

Clinton was right -- "proper vetting" in 2022 would have saved Riley's life

The New York Post's Editorial Board also pounced on the remarks from former President Clinton and asserted that while he was absolutely correct that Riley's murder could have been avoided if her killer had been properly vetted, he was dead wrong to try and blame Riley's death on former President Trump's opposition to the bipartisan Senate immigration bill earlier this year.

As noted, Ibarra was caught and released without being vetted in 2022, long before the aforementioned bill -- that most Republicans in the House opposed even without Trump's noted opposition, as it would have codified the Biden-Harris regime's lax enforcement policies -- was introduced in the divided Senate in an election year when President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats finally realized that rampant illegal immigration was hurting them in the polls.

The proposed bill would not have saved Riley, but you know what would have -- Biden and Harris keeping place all of Trump's tough border policies, which they immediately canceled upon entering office in 2021, that would have blocked Ibarra from entering the country in the first place.