How to add clips to timeline and delete clip's audio WITHOUT deleting audio on underlying music trac

Adobe Premier Elements 2022 for Windows
I place my music on the music track as a bed to build a music video.
When importing video clips to lay over the music on the timeline, I unlink Video and Audio, then delete the Audio portion of the imported clip.
This causes the underlying music track to also delete the same length of audio on the underlying track - how can I prevent my music track from deleting when deleting the audio from an imported video clip?

I did not have this problem in a previous versio of the same software.