Last week, President Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act, which requires the attorney general to detain any non-citizen charged with theft or shoplifting, among other offenses. While doing so, the president claimed there are “30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
Both the legislation and the president’s claim about our capacity to detain non-citizens indicate the current administration has taken a page out of “Alice in Wonderland,” in which the Queen of Hearts demands “Sentence first, verdict afterward.”
The Laken Riley Act mandates that non-citizens who are “charged with … arrested for … or admit (to) committing acts which constitute burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting or assault of a law enforcement officer” be taken into federal custody. It essentially ends the presumption of innocence for non-citizens since merely being accused of one of the designated offenses will subject the person to federal detention.
The act also allows federal detention of non-citizens based solely on their admission that they committed one of the designated offenses. So law enforcement officers can now arrest someone they suspect of being a non-citizen and claim that the person admitted that they committed one of the designated offenses. That person can then be taken into federal custody without ever filing a charge in state court.
This violates one of the oldest rules of evidence: A person cannot be convicted of an offense based solely on their confession. The rule is designed to discourage officers from trying to extract confessions from someone when they have no other evidence of their guilt.
However, the Laken Riley Act makes it possible to detain someone based solely on the testimony of a law enforcement officer even if there is no other evidence that a crime occurred.
If that’s not alarming enough, we have the president’s claim that there are 30,000 beds in Guantanamo Bay, a statement that can be added to his already long list of lies. While the naval base in Cuba has a detention center for suspected terrorists, it has never held more than 800 detainees and currently holds just 15 people.
To put that 30,000 number further into perspective, the largest jail population in the United States belongs to Los Angeles, where there are approximately 13,000 inmates. Trump is claiming a detention facility with 15 detainees can increase by 199,900 percent and transform into our largest detention center overnight.
Even if there were 30,000 beds in Guantanamo Bay, you would still need people to work there.
The New York City Department of Corrections, which is responsible for running Rikers Island, has roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of uniformed staff to inmates. While that might seem surprising, a detention facility needs to be staffed around the clock while maintaining sufficient staffing levels to ensure the safety of both the detainees and the officers.
Only about 6,000 people live at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. How would you possibly create the necessary infrastructure and recruit the thousands of staff to run what would, according to the president, amount to the largest jail in the U.S. — not to mention that the current cost per inmate at Guantanamo Bay is $36 million a year?
Even if Trump were honest and could actually conjure up 30,000 beds in Guantanamo, the Homeland Security Department estimates needing 110,000 more detention beds to meet the new demand.
Perhaps Trump’s plan isn’t to create a safe or secure detention facility. More likely, he doesn’t have a plan at all, as suggested by his actions of signing a bill that will drastically increase the number of non-citizens held in federal detention facilities that are already near capacity.
It would seem that Congress, which passed the Laken Riley Act without additional funding for Homeland Security, also doesn’t have a plan, as it’s estimated that enforcement will require an additional $26.9 billion in its first year.
It is painfully obvious that Trump doesn’t think non-citizens deserve the basic rights guaranteed to American citizens. But apparently, the president and most members of Congress also don’t care about the safety or welfare of the American citizens who will have to pay for and work in overcrowded and dangerous detention facilities.
John Gross is a clinical associate professor of law at University of Wisconsin Law School and director of the Public Defender Project.
