President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November once again left Democrats reeling and grasping for an answer as to how this could have happened. Among the many possible culprits under scrutiny is the party’s stance on immigration, one of the two issues Trump hammered the hardest during the campaign. With a disturbing vote in the Senate on Friday morning, we’re seeing congressional Democrats scramble to add their support to the GOP’s anti-immigrant agenda in the misguided hope of warding off future defeats.
As a testament to its political salience, the newly GOP-led Congress last week moved forward as its top priority the Laken Riley Act. Riley was a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year.
In brief, the bill focuses on speeding up deportation for accused criminals. The key word there is “accused,” as the bill changes federal law to require federal law enforcement to detain any undocumented immigrant that “is charged with, is arrested for, is convicted of, admits having committed, or admits committing acts which constitute the essential elements of any burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting offense.” (Riley's killer was an undocumented migrant from Venezuela who crossed the border in 2022 and had been cited for shoplifting, leading to the provisions in the bill.)
Lurid as the details of Riley's death are, the bill that is moving forward in her name is ripe for abuse by an administration that is determined to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Trump and others have claimed that his plans will focus on removing dangerous criminals, but the target numbers that are under discussion require a hammer, not a scalpel.
A law that empowers local law enforcement to round up and ship suspects to federal detention facilities will only add to how many innocents, including potentially American citizens, will be caught up in the dragnet. In short, this new legal impetus for detaining and potentially removing anyone even accused of a crime will certainly make it easier to justify the possible violations of due process that are likely to follow.
There are also reasons for Democrats to be skeptical about this bill that cut beyond enabling Trump’s deportation sweeps. The law as written would grant new powers to state attorneys general to sue the federal government “if the State or its residents experience harm, including financial harm in excess of $100.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which will be tasked with managing a new influx of detainees, said in a recent memo that the act would be “impossible to execute with existing resources.” Likewise, an effort to ramp up deportation of criminals known as the Safe Communities program did little to make communities safer:
A primary goal of the program was reducing crime, however, the share of those deported that had a serious criminal conviction was relatively small: 17% of those deported as part of Secure Communities were not convicted of any crime, and the most serious criminal conviction for 79% of those deported was non-violent— including traffic violations and immigration offenses (such as illegal entry or re-entry or possession of fraudulent documents for 8% of those deported). Researchers have found no evidence that the implementation of Secure Communities had the effect of reducing crime.
But when the House passed its version of the bill last week, it was with more Democratic support than the one introduced last March had obtained. The Senate took up its own draft of the bill this week and its passage now seems all but guaranteed. With no chance that the bill would fail on a simple majority vote, the procedural votes to bring the bill to the floor and open debate passed easily with votes to spare. A truncated amendment process provided no changes that would hope to win over Democratic votes — as a proposed alteration from Sen. Chris Coons, D-Conn., to strip out the provisions empowering state attorneys general went down on a party line vote.
With 53 seats in the Senate this term, Republicans need at least seven Democrats to back any legislation to overcome a potential filibuster. The bill cleared that hurdle easily on Friday morning with at least eight votes from across the aisle to move the bill to a final vote. There’s no guarantee that all of them will vote for final passage, but given the names on the list, many of whom are moderates from states that Trump won in November, a change of heart seems unlikely.
What we’re seeing unfold feels like the immigration version of the debate in the 1990s on crime, when Democrats were overly eager to prove that they could be tough on criminals. The resulting laws broke up communities, enabled bigoted targeting and have been looked upon harshly in hindsight. The Laken Riley Act is the debunked “broken windows” theory of crime prevention applied to deportation, the idea that an undocumented migrant accused of a low-level crime is inherently possible of committing more violent crimes in the future.
This rush to provide a new set of tools for the incoming administration to carry out its most extreme policies seems imprudent. Democratic support for this bill seems like it will at best help some politicians’ political fortunes while doing little to reduce crime. It would come at the expense of harming an untold number of people, a calculation that should have left the bill stalled out in the Senate rather than on a trajectory to Trump’s desk once a final version passes in the House.
Passing a bad law won’t bring Laken Riley back to life nor will it make communities safer. Democrats backing a bad law won’t reverse last November’s loss or inoculate them from further GOP attacks. It is a failure both of policy and politics for them to pretend otherwise.