US President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed the Laken Riley Act, bringing into effect the law aimed at cracking down on migrants charged with crimes, promoting it as the key piece of his pledge to toughen actions toward illegal migrants.
“It’s a landmark law that we’re doing today. It’s going to save countless innocent American lives,” Trump said while signing the bill at the White House. “This is something that has brought Democrats and Republicans together, that’s not easy to do,” he added.
Laken Riley Act
The bill aims to make it easier for officials to detain undocumented migrants who are charged with committing crimes, further expanding the list of offences that would need mandatory holding.
The Laken Riley Act mandates the Homeland Security Department to take into custody illegal migrants who are charged with crimes that resulted in death or serious bodily injury to another person. The list of crimes also includes assaulting law enforcement officials, as well as lesser offences like burglary, larceny or shoplifting.
The act empowers the state officials to sue the federal government if they think it is not enforcing the law, a Bloomberg report said.
Notably, the bill is named after a young nursing student from Georgia, who was killed by an undocumented migrant in 2024, a case which became a turning point in the debates over immigration and border security.
At the signing ceremony of the bill, Laken Riley’s parents and sister also joined the US President.
“This horrific atrocity should never have been allowed to happen. And as president, I’m fighting every single day to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again,” Trump said.
The Republican-dominated US Congress handed Trump an early win in his crackdown on illegal immigration last week, passing the bill to expand pre-trial detention for foreign criminal suspects.
This bill is also Trump’s first piece of legislation to come into effect in his second term at the White House.
The bill was passed in the Senate with a 64-35 vote earlier this month, following which the House of Representatives approved it with a 263-256 vote.
Trump and his administration has been batting on its action against immigration, which was a part of one of the executive orders the US President signed right after taking the White House.
Additionally, the US President on Wednesday said that he was signing an executive order to direct the Department of Defence and Homeland Security to examine creating a facility at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to hold as many as 30,000 undocumented migrants.
“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo,” Trump said.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people,” the president added.
(with inputs from agencies)
