ATHENS, Ga. >> Details of how the Venezuelan migrant charged with killing Laken Riley ended up in Athens, Ga., came into sharper focus Monday, the second day of a trial that is being closely followed by supporters of President-elect Donald Trump’s planned immigration crackdown.

The migrant, José Ibarra, was apprehended by the Border Patrol when he entered the country illegally in 2022 near El Paso, Texas. Like many migrants, he was released with temporary permission to stay in the country, and he headed to New York.

A former roommate of Ibarra’s, Rosbeli Flores-Bello, testified that she met Ibarra last year in New York City and traveled with him to Athens in September 2023 after Ibarra’s brother told them they could find jobs there.

Flores-Bello said that Ibarra’s brother Diego had constantly called him in New York, telling him to move to Athens because there were good work opportunities.

‘Reticketing’

In early September last year, Flores-Bello testified, she and Ibarra asked for plane tickets to Atlanta at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, which had become New York City’s official welcome center for migrants. Through a process known as “reticketing,” the city has paid for the travel of tens of thousands of migrants who wish to move elsewhere.

They flew to Atlanta on Sept. 28 and moved into the apartment in Athens where, five months later, Flores-Bello would awake to police officers coming to arrest her roommate on a murder charge.

Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, set off for a run shortly after 9 a.m. on Feb. 22. Prosecutors say that she encountered Ibarra on a wooded trail on the University of Georgia campus, about a mile from her apartment. He blocked her as she tried to call 911 for help, according to an indictment, and pulled up her clothes with the intent to rape her.

Ibarra then strangled her and hit her over the head multiple times with a rock, “seriously disfiguring” her, the indictment said.

Immigration debate

The case became a rallying cry for Trump and other Republicans who wanted to frame Riley’s killing as a result of President Joe Biden’s failure to secure the nation’s borders. In particular, Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that many migrants are violent criminals.

As he spoke about border security during his State of the Union address weeks after the killing, Biden mentioned Riley by name.

In other testimony Tuesday, a number of local and federal law enforcement witnesses provided detailed accounts that placed Ibarra at the scene of Riley’s killing, mainly through cellphone data and GPS tracking data from Riley’s smartwatch.

The prosecution is expected to rest its case Tuesday; defense lawyers told the judge, H. Patrick Haggard of State Superior Court, that they would not need more than half a day to present their own case.

Haggard is holding a bench trial, with no jury, at the request of Ibarra’s lawyers. In such trials, the judge alone determines whether the defendant is guilty.

This report contains information from the Associated Press