The first bill that the new Congress will send to US President Donald Trump for signature will be a provision to tighten measures against migrants accused of crimes, Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives Steve Scalise said.
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“Today we will send the first piece of legislation to President Trump’s desk for signing: the Laken Riley Act. I think that’s remarkable,” Scalise told reporters.
According to him, previous US President “Joe Biden would not have signed this bill.”
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The document is named in connection with the high-profile murder of 22-year-old American Riley; it requires the detention of migrants arrested for minor crimes. A man convicted of murdering a girl several months before the crime was arrested on charges of shoplifting but was released pending trial.
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Republicans used the murder in their election campaigns as an example of rampant crime among illegal immigrants. Biden, while delivering his State of the Union speech last March, mixed up the girl’s name, calling her Lincoln, for which the murdered woman’s mother later blamed the then-president. Biden later apologized, but not for the slip, but for calling the criminal an “illegal,” although, according to him, he should have been called an “undocumented person.”
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American justice, citing the presumption of innocence, uses a preventive measure in the form of detention, as a rule, only in relation to those accused of serious crimes – attacks or murders, if there is evidence that the defendants can escape from investigation and trial.
