The mother of the 22-year-old nursing student who was killed by an illegal immigrant last year, Laken Riley, joined President Donald Trump during the signing of the immigration reform bill named after her.
Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act, which will allow federal authorities to detain illegal immigrants who have committed theft-related crimes and give states the ability to sue the Department of Homeland Security for harm caused to their citizens because of illegal immigration, on Wednesday afternoon. The legislation is the first bill the president has signed since he assumed office earlier this month.
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Riley’s mother, Allyson Phillips, delivered brief, emotional remarks before the president signed the legislation. He presented Phillips with the pen he used as a gift following the ceremony.
“There’s no amount of change that will ever bring back our precious Laken. Our hope moving forward is that her life saves lives,” Phillips said ahead of the bill’s signing. “We’re so thankful that her passion for helping others and her legacy for doing good in the name of Jesus Christ will carry on.”
Wednesday’s signing ceremony was attended by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and other members of Trump’s Cabinet, Republican lawmakers, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), and Riley’s family.
“Laken was a brilliant and beautiful, 22 year old nursing student from Georgia, the best in her class,” the president himself said near the top of his speech. “We will keep Laken’s memory alive in our hearts forever, everyone’s hearts, with today’s action, and they will also live forever in the laws of our country, and this is a very important law.”
Trump proceeded to castigate former President Joe Biden for his “stupid” immigration policies, a stalwart of the president’s first week-and-a-half in office.
“How can people do this? How can they allow this to happen? How can they allow criminals to pour into our country and then try and defend it?” he stated.
Trump also thanked every Republican lawmaker, Fetterman, and the 60 Democratic members of Congress who voted to send the bill to Trump’s desk.
“A big percentage of them came through, and plenty of them wanted to. They probably felt they couldn’t, but they really wanted to,” the president said of Democratic lawmakers. “They don’t understand that would have made them a lot more popular, would have made them a lot better with their people. The ones that didn’t are going to be — they’re going to be sorry.”
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Trump also announced plans to sign a new executive order directing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing a detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to hold 30,000 “criminal, illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them back,” he claimed. “We’re going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”
You can watch Trump’s ceremony in full below.
