Nothing about the Laken Riley Act, the anti-immigration law that passed the House last week and is now being taken up in the Senate , would have prevented the murder of the young Georgia nursing student for whom it was named. But the appropriation of her death by anti-immigration hard-liners felt inevitable: As soon as law enforcement said last February that an undocumented immigrant was their suspect, Republicans seized on the story—one of many right-wing attempts to link the Biden administration with “migrant crime,” stoke moral panic, and propel Trump to the White House. Now Republicans have found a startling number of Democrats to support their crackdown: The Laken Riley Act is on track to become one of the first bills Trump will sign into law.
The bill, originally introduced shortly after Riley’s murder in 2024, aims to do two things: First, it creates a new mandate for the detention of immigrants—primarily but not only undocumented immigrants—for merely being arrested for a number of low-level theft-related offenses. And second, it affords sweeping new powers to state attorneys general to potentially override federal immigration policy, allowing them to sue agencies for—in their eyes—failing to detain immigrants, or to even sue the State Department for allowing visas from a given country if that country refuses to reaccept citizens that Immigration and Customs Enforcement deports.
None of this would have saved Laken Riley. The man convicted of Riley’s murder, Jose Ibarra, entered the United States in 2022, along with his wife and young son, at the southern border, where he was detained by ICE. Ibarra was released while his asylum claim was processed—something which is very common, and which can take a long time, as there are hundreds of thousands of people awaiting asylum decisions. He reportedly had two encounters with law enforcement while his case proceeded: In New York, he was arrested for driving a scooter without a license, along with having a child passenger riding without a helmet. He was later issued a citation for shoplifting about $200 worth of food and clothing from a Georgia Walmart, according to police in Athens-Clarke County; they also said citation and release is standard practice in such cases. As Steve Kennedy pointed out earlier this week at TNR, “The Laken Riley Act does require federal authorities to detain arrested immigrants if they are not being held by local police, but it has no requirements for the police themselves, so there is nothing in this proposed law that would have compelled them to detain Ibarra.” (Of course, if police were to be compelled to detain individuals like Ibarra who would otherwise be released due to the prior charges being low-level criminal offenses, they would be holding them based on their status as an immigrant, alone.)…