On January 29, Trump signed his first bill into law in his second term as president: the Laken Riley Act, a piece of extreme anti-immigrant legislation that requires the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of crimes as petty as shoplifting—with the potential for deportation. Notably, the law requires the detention of immigrants before they are convicted. Both Republicans and some Democrats voted in favor of the bill, with 48 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 12 in the Senate joining their Republican colleagues in support.
According to federal immigration officials, this bill could require the detention for 60,000 people—requiring billions of dollars more in funding for Trump’s massive anti-immigrant crackdown. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said that the agency needs more than USD 3.2 billion in extra funds for the 2025 fiscal year in order to enforce the Laken Riley Act. ICE currently has funding for only 42,000 detention beds.
In December, US federal immigration enforcement had already cited a need for extra funding for more officers and tens of thousands of additional detention beds in order to enforce the Laken Riley Act. While signing the act into law, Trump announced plans to send the “worst criminal aliens” to the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Trump’s administration also sent out a memorandum directing the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to “take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
The Laken Riley Act was named after a 22-year-old Augusta University student who was killed last year by José Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant. Her murder has been heavily weaponized by the right-wing as a way to paint undocumented immigrants as a whole as violent criminals. The crime took place in Georgia, a factor which influenced the more progressive Democratic Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to be among the 12 Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the bill.
