Rep. Steve King (R-IA) says men from the “most violent countries in the world” are “invading” the United States through illegal and legal immigration.

In an interview with an Austrian media outlet, King discussed the death of 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts whose body was found in September in a cornfield in her rural hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa after she was last seen jogging on July 18.

Christian Bahena-Rivera, an illegal alien from Mexico, has been charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts’ death after police say he admitted to confronting and chasing down the young woman. The illegal alien lived in a region of Iowa that was surrounded by sanctuary cities, as Breitbart News noted, and an initial autopsy report revealed that Bahena-Rivera allegedly stabbed Tibbetts to death.

King said if the U.S. had enforced federal immigration law properly, Bahena-Rivera would have not been in the country to begin with and Tibbetts would still be alive.

King said:

If Mollie Tibbetts had carried a 15 ounce gun, it would have been more useful to her than her cell phone. I don’t want to see everybody in the US carrying a gun. It’s not practical, they are heavy, you might only need it once in ten lifetimes. The defense I am really talking about is this: the individual who murdered Mollie Tibbetts should have never been in America. [Emphasis added] … Liberals in the US say that Mollie Tibbetts’ death is just because the perpetrator was male, that it didn’t have anything to do with him being a law breaker, a criminal. And what I say to those people who say that immigration isn’t part of her death is: then go and tell her family, that if her killer had been deported the minute he set foot illegally on US soil, your daughter would still be dead. But they wouldn’t do that because that would contradict their Leftist agenda. We have a sense of morality. They have an agenda. What is missing here from the mindset of the policy makers: they don’t know this data. They don’t want to acknowledge facts that contradict their agenda. [Emphasis added]