The new president of the United States, Republican Donald Trump, signed on Wednesday a law, the first since his return to the White House, which gives the green light to the immigration authorities to detain migrants who have been able to commit a minor crime, As thefts or robberies, or accuse them of assaulting police officers.
The law, which has been baptized with the name of Laken Riley, In honor of a nursing student murdered in Augusta in 2024 by José Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant without papers. The case fueled the debate in the United States on migration, just in the final stretch of the November elections, which lost the still vice president Kamala Harris in front of Donald Trump, a few months after finishing the mandate of Joe Biden.
Months later, the House of Representatives approved the law with 263 votes in favor and 156 against. The Senate, on the other hand, gave ‘green light’ to the legislation with 12 favorable votes from the Democratic ranks. A rule that also authorizes states to sue the Federal Government for breaching the measure, which includes liberating migrants who are in police custody or not stop those who have received deportation orders.
The text of the Laken Riley Law will also authorize the general prosecutors of the states of the country to intervene in the migration policy of the federal government. Among the new powers, they will be allowed to force the State Department not to grant more visas to
“The United States will never forget Laken Riley,” said Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House, where he has gathered a hundred guests, including Laken Riley’s relatives, to sign the new legislation. “The law will become the first bill that promulgated as 47th president of the United States,” said the US President, who also assured that the person responsible for the death of the young nursing student, from Venezuela, should have been deported.
Civil rights NGOs shout in heaven
Organizations that defend civil rights and migrants have denounced the measure for considering it too radical, to the point that it could trigger massive arrests against people accused of minor crimes, such as theft in stores. Amnesty International (AI), meanwhile, has warned that this law “capitalizes a horrible tragedy”, referring to Riley’s death, to “promote the migration agenda” of Trump “of Trump and convert them” into scapegoats. “
“The mandatory arrest only for being accused of theft deprives of their right to due process to all persons of their right to due process for non -violent crimes and constitutes arbitrary detention according to international law,” says the director of the refugee program and AI migrants in the United States, Amy Fischer. In this sense, Fischer argues that the measure is based on “bulos and xenophobic narratives that dehumanize and criminalize a whole group for the actions of a single person.” “It will separate families and make our less safe communities,” he added.
According to the calculations made by US media, the Trump administration would need to spend more than 3,000 million dollars and increase detention capacity to more than 60,000 beds to apply the law. “It is totally unfeasible,” adds Amy Fischer in the statement of Amnesty International, in which she recalls that this rule will generate “chaos” in federal courts.
Trump put the migration in the focus of his campaign and has pressed the government agencies to impose a quota of minimum daily arrests per agent and raise the total number of arrests between 1,200 and 1,500 per day. The president has suggested that the approval of this law is only the beginning. In a meeting with Republican legislators at his hotel in Doral, near Florida, the president stressed that he shows the potential of additional bills that will help them take energetic measures “against criminal foreigners and completely restore the rule of law in the country “
