US President Donald Trump signed his first law on Wednesday since he returned to power, a measure that allows immigration authorities to arrest migrants for robbery and other minor crimes before they have been convicted.

Trump initialed the law, the first since the beginning of his second term on January 20, in the East Room of the White House, before a hundred guests, including relatives of Laken Riley, a young woman murdered by an undocumented migrant whose death inspired the legislation.

“The United States will never forget Laken Riley,” said Trump, who said that the migrant who murdered her, from Venezuela, should have been deported.

“Instead of being expelled, as should have happened, he was released in the United States, like millions of other people, many of them very dangerous, but you see what we are doing: we are getting them out of here,” he stressed.

During his speech, Trump told the story of Laken Riley, whose name the law bears. Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered in the state of Georgia in February 2024 by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant, José Ibarra.

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Ibarra resided irregularly in the United States and had been arrested for a minor crime of shoplifting, but was allowed to stay in the country while his immigration case was in process. The migrant found guilty of Riley’s murder at the end of 2024 and is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

His death fueled the debate on immigration in the final stretch of the November 2024 elections, in which the Democratic candidate and then vice president, Kamala Harris, lost to Trump, who had promised the largest deportations in the history of the country.

The initiative, approved on January 22 by the House of Representatives, by a Republican majority, with the almost unanimous support of that bench – except for one legislator who did not vote – and the support of 46 Democratic congressmen.

The law also received the approval of the Senate, where the Republicans have a majority, with the support of 12 Democratic senators, despite the opposition of activists for the rights of immigrants, traditionally aligned with the Democratic Party.

These groups denounced the measure for considering it too radical, to the point that it could trigger massive raids against people accused of minor crimes, such as shoplifting.

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Civil rights and immigrant organizations also warned that the law eliminates due process for those accused of non-violent crimes.

The arrests contemplated in the new legislation include petty thefts in supermarkets or stores and detainees will be placed in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The text will also authorize the attorneys general of the states of the country to intervene in the immigration policy decisions of the federal government. Among the new powers, they will be allowed to force the State Department to no longer grant visas to citizens of countries that do not accept deportations from the United States.

According to US media estimates, the government would need to spend more than 3 billion dollars and increase the capacity to detain migrants to more than 60,000 beds in order to enforce that law.

Trump put migration at the focus of his campaign and has pressured government agencies to impose a minimum daily arrests quota per agent and raise the total number of arrests to between 1,200 and 1,500 per day.

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The US president suggested that the approval of this law is just the beginning. At a conference of Republican legislators at his hotel in Doral, near Florida, he highlighted on Monday that he shows the potential of bills that will help them take vigorous measures “against criminal foreigners and fully restore the rule of law in the country.”