Trump’s Laken Riley Act is misuse of tragedy intended only to persecute immigrants | Opinion
While President Donald Trump has issued numerous executive orders in the last 11 days, the Laken Riley Act, which Trump signed on Wednesday, marked the first piece of legislation he has put into law in his new term. The legislation is named for an Augusta University nursing student who was murdered last year in Georgia by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela.
But the Laken Riley Act is nothing but an attempt to persecute immigrants in the name of a murdered woman; it is a terrible misuse of tragedy for political gain and to further anti-immigrant policies.
Jose Ibarra had been twice arrested previously on lesser charges — including illegal entry and child endangerment — before he murdered Riley while she was on a morning jog in February 2024. Ibarra was convicted of murder and other charges in the Riley case and is currently serving a life sentence without parole.
The new Laken Riley Act requires federal authorities to detain undocumented immigrants charged, but not convicted, with assaulting law enforcement. But it goes dangerously farther by including lesser crimes such as burglary and theft — even if they have yet to be convicted.
This law ignores the right to due process and will only serve to speed up the deportation of undocumented people and immigrants, both fairly and unfairly. And that’s the whole point: The Trump Administration will use any chance, any excuse, it can find to deport immigrants.
“If someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court without a moment to assert their right … of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’” said U.S. Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in a floor speech in the House last week.
There is also concern that the bill will make it easier for abusers and human traffickers to use deportation as a tool to control women. Groups that seek to help victims of gender-based violence in particular have been sounding the alarm.
Using Riley’s name to subvert the Constitution and due process is a disgusting appropriation of a murdered woman’s memory, and is a slap in the face to all victims of gender-based violence. While Riley’s mother and sister attended Trump’s bill signing ceremony in support of the president, Riley’s father, Jason Riley, told NBC News last year that he fears her death has been exploited as a political wedge. (Laken Riley’s parents divorced when she was a child.)
“I’d rather her not be such a political, how you say — it started a storm in our country,” Jason Riley said, “and it’s incited a lot of people.”
It’s not surprising Trump would flaunt the supportive members of Riley’s family during the bill signing ceremony. Yet for all his fanfare, it’s unclear if the bill would have even stopped her horrific murder that day in 2024. There is, however, an unacceptable chance that the law now in her name will keep vulnerable women under the thumb of abusers, pimps and traffickers
“At the end of the day, the Laken Riley Act will affect migrant communities throughout the country and Californians are not going to get a pass,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an immigration law professor at Ohio State University, told The Sacramento Bee.
Now that the government is allowed to detain and deport immigrants without just cause or defense, what is to stop the Trump Administration from extending that exemption to legal immigrants, even citizens, charged with a crime?
Trump called the law “a tremendous tribute” to the young woman whose name is on the bill, but God help me if I am ever the victim of a crime so exploited for political gain. Americans should be able to mourn the death of Laken Riley and punish her murderer without sweeping away rights in this country’s latest, shameful attempt at a dragnet.
This story was originally published February 1, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
