When women are only honored in death—and only when useful to power—we all lose.
USA Today recently reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now deporting crime witnesses before they can assist in the prosecution of those charged with criminal offenses. ICE is also deporting defendants before their hearings, leaving victims and communities without justice and accountability.
The reporter called this the “Laken Riley effect,” in reference to a new federal law that allows for the rapid deportation of immigrants, even if they have not been convicted of a crime. Republicans named this sweeping bill after Laken Riley, a young Georgia woman who in 2024 was murdered by a man who also happened to be an immigrant. Thus, the bill’s name essentially covers up a hazardous order with an objectively horrific but strategically deadening event. Several Democrats were scared into complicity, and just as predicted, the bill is already making our communities less safe.
The reporter raises an important discussion by bringing the issue of deporting crime witnesses to light. His reporting critically demonstrates the blatant hypocrisy within the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
But he consequently echoes the tone of the anti-immigration policy in his efforts to fight it: by treating Laken Riley like a pawn, not a person.
I know, as so many women do, that society devalues our lives and puts us at risk. Misogyny and misogynoir are real. I’m devastated and tired of watching women die or be aggressed at the hands of men, both in the news and “entertainment” media. Even pop culture and sports display the thin and vulnerable line where women’s experiences stand on the scale of trust and priority.
Today, women have the right to vote, work, even wear pants in public, as absurdly scandalous as that once was. But when will women get to decide how we use and understand our bodies as an extension of our autonomy, not a political tool? Better yet, when will systems be designed to actually protect us? When will society teach men how to be healthy and safe partners, fathers, husbands, co-workers, neighbors, friends and strangers?
Until then, said producer of the podcast Believe Her, Justine van der Leun, “only in death can a woman secure her status as the perfect victim. No voice, no power, no pulse—then, she deserves our sympathy.” And that sympathy can often go to a worse cause, employed as a power ploy to cause even more harm.
Right now, Adriana Smith’s life-supported body is being used as a vessel to gestate her fetus while her family sits in perpetual pain by her bedside, all as a result of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. In Ohio, Brittany Watts was subjected to horrifying treatment by hospital staff and police while experiencing a life-threatening pregnancy complication and devastating miscarriage—an in-utero miscarriage that was categorized by her prosecutors as “abuse of a corpse.” The details are almost too horrific to recount.
Amazingly, Watts fought back, suing St. Joseph Warren Hospital, Bon Secours Mercy Health, Detective Nicholas Carney, and the City of Warren. The strength and support network it must have taken for Watts to sue her attackers is superhuman. Most of us are just regular people. But we know what we need to be safe and to thrive: the right to decide what happens to our bodies, a community and supportive family around us, a society that respects and believes us.
I’m talking both to the man who murdered Laken Riley and the people who use her name to push their own agenda. Laken Riley is not a bill or a law. She was a person.
It’s time for the world to give Laken Riley her name back. Let her family remember her for the life she lived. Let them empower her memory without invoking her name as a political battle cry. And let’s fight for a world where we invoke Riley’s memory to protect more women just like her, and not for another twisted cause.
