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The Trump administration’s recent mass deportations of Venezuelan gang members to a notorious, maximum-security prison in El Salvador has sparked questions about whether Augusta University student Laken Riley’s convicted killer could be sent there.
A Georgia judge in November found Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal immigrant, guilty of 10 total counts in connection with the 22-year-old nursing student’s death and sentenced him to life in prison. Ibarra, 27, attacked Riley while she was jogging along a trail on the University of Georgia campus and beat her to death.
“I’m still furious that Jose Ibarra wasn’t sentenced to death in Georgia—because that’s the justice Laken Riley deserved,” Republican Georgia State Sen. Colton Moore told Fox News Digital. “This monster should suffer every single day for what he did. If we can send him to El Salvador’s hellhole of a prison, where he’ll rot in misery, then I’m all for it. And if President Trump makes it happen, he’ll have my full support.”
Moore added, however, that he has not “heard anything about Georgia relinquishing control of its state justice system or handing over prisoners like Ibarra to foreign authorities.”

In this photo provided by El Salvador’s presidential press office, prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on Sunday, March 16. (El Salvador presidential press office via AP)
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg recently ordered an immediate stop to the deportation efforts so he could have more time to consider if Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, said in a March 12 analysis that “even if imprisonment in El Salvador does not strip incarcerated citizens of their status, it is still illegal under Trump’s own touted First Step Act.”
“Signed by Trump in 2018 during his first term, the law included changes in federal sentencing in addition to reforms intended to improve the conditions of those in federal prisons. The law mandates that the federal government place people in ‘a facility as close as practicable to the prisoner’s primary residence, and to the extent practicable, in a facility within 500 driving miles of that residence,’” Eisen wrote.