Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, was murdered while on a run on February 22, 2024, by Jose Antonio Ibarra. Riley was attacked with a rock several times and asphyxiated by Ibarra. Ibarra was indicted (a formal accusation that a crime has been committed) on 10 different counts: malice murder, three counts of felony murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated assault with intent to rape, aggravated battery, obstructing a person making an emergency call, tampering with evidence, and peeping Tom. Ibarra was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole November 20, 2024.
It was revealed that Ibarra was an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant who had been arrested by New York police last august for acting in a way that would injure a child and a motor license violation but was released before a detainer (a notification sent by a judge or prosecutor instructing a prison official that a prisoner is wanted to answer criminal charges and should continue to be detained) could be issued.
Ibarra being undocumented has shifted focus from the murder of Riley to the issue of Immigration, with president Donald Trump weighing in that Riley “would be alive if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country,” during his speech accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination last year. However, Biden kept most Trump-era border policies—such as Title 42 that allowed U.S. officials to turn away migrants and deny them the right to seek asylum.
This discourse resulted in the House of Representatives passing the Laken Riley Act on Tuesday, January. 7, a bill sponsored and partly written by Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, a member of the republican party who represents the town where Riley lived.
Despite opposition from democratic leadership, the Laken Riley Act was signed into law on Wednesday, January 29 by President Trump, who remarked that the law is “going to save countless innocent American lives.”
The law is defined as requiring the Department of Homeland Security to detain, without bail, all non-citizen individuals who are in the US and have been charged with, arrested for, convicted of, or have admitted to committing a crime like burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting. President Trump then spoke about plans to house deportees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an infamous detention center with accusations of torture that has been used to hold Muslim militants and suspected terrorists.
Before the signing took place, Riley’s mother stood at the podium and thanked President Trump for not forgetting her daughter and said that her family “will forever be grateful for the prayers of the people across our nation and for helping get this legislation into law.” A few months earlier, Laken Riley’s father, Jason Riley, clarified that he had been feeling overwhelmed by the politicization of the circumstances surrounding his daughter’s death in an interview with NBC News. Additionally, he explains that his daughter’s death “started a storm in our country,” that has incited a lot of people.
