The House’s lightspeed passage of the Laken Riley Act (H.R. 29) is a worrisome indicator of the ongoing decay in Congressional decision-making that results in dysfunctional laws.
It’s support among Democrats suggests that in this new political climate, few are willing to stand in defense of immigrant rights.
The bill, named for the 22-year-old University of Georgia student killed in 2024 by a Venezuelan migrant, sanctions the unconstitutional detention and possible deportation of thousands of non-citizens who have never committed a crime.
“It is completely outside the norms of the American legal system to subject people to incarceration without even the possibility of bond after merely the arrest/charging state,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in response to questions over the bill’s provisions.
The bill passed the House this week by a vote of 264-159—with 48 House Democrats joining the Republican majority—as its’ first new piece of legislation this year. It now heads to the Senate where it appears to be gaining support even among Democratic lawmakers.
Yet while the Laken Riley Act is now being hailed as a welcome bi-partisan effort in “Making America Great Again,” in truth it is a first step toward assembling the administrative machinery to implement mass deportation plans already outlined by President-Elect Trump, his advisor Stephen Miller, and scores of anti-immigrant legislators.
Worse yet, it moves us even further along a MAGA-inspired pathway toward authoritarian governance.
Much as Republicans did during the ’24 campaign, proponents of the Laken Riley Act are exploiting a real-life tragedy as the rationale for vindictive and poorly designed immigration enforcement measures.
The bill’s broad provisions—requiring detention by ICE of any unauthorized migrant in the country accused of a theft-related crime—will detract from more focused and effective identification, apprehension, and detention of violent criminals. It will, at the same time, siphon resources from ongoing efforts to block future entry of criminals and terrorists.
Laken Riley’s murderer was, indeed, an unauthorized immigrant, a “monster” as President Trump characterized him, and a shoplifter. But legislation targeting non-citizens merely accused of shoplifting or other non-violent crimes does little to protect Americans from actual violent crime—which data show is committed at far higher rates by US born citizens—and similarly fails to address the challenges of border security.
It is in reality political smoke and mirrors, acknowledged Speaker Johnson, a ploy to challenge Democrats’ political identity. And it seems to be working.
“I look forward to continuing to discuss this bill with my colleagues, and I welcome a serious bipartisan conversation about what we need to do to fix our broken immigration system,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., in a statement Thursday. Warnock voted to begin Senate debate of the bill though he did not say whether he would support final passage.
Support for the bill from elected officials such as Congressman Josh Harder, D- Ca. and Senators Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelley of Arizona, meanwhile, who represent communities with hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them non-citizens, raises vexing questions as to why progressive elected officials might so rapidly go along with this MAGA-inspired street theater.
Yet as Democrats rush to paint themselves as serious on immigration and border security following the ’24 shellacking they took on these issues, they run the risk of overlooking the very real threats bills like the Laken Riley Act pose.
According to immigration law expert David Isaacson, who reviewed an earlier version of the bill when it was first presented to Congress last year, the Laken Riley Act would mandate detention without bail of any DACA recipient, asylum applicant, or other immigrant who was arrested and deemed to have “entered without inspection.” Those provisions remain in the bill’s current version.
Isaacson goes on to explain that, while current immigration law considers juvenile court outcomes not to be criminal “convictions,” the Laken Riley Act would make these children and youth similarly vulnerable.
Tragically, it seems “playing the game” has become more important in 2025 than bona fide problem-solving as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seek a “magic amulet” to reassure voters they can go about safely in their neighborhoods.
But will the Laken Riley Act actually protect our communities from crime? No. Instead, it simply feeds into President-elect Trump’s absurd assertion that immigrants are mostly criminals, as opposed to law-abiding members of our communities whose contributions are vital to the continued health of our economy.
And like other fake news and political sleight-of-hand, it stands in the way of serious efforts to find more effective solutions, including a streamlining of the overall immigration system to rapidly and fairly adjudicate asylum cases while deploying available funding to apprehend and deport the most dangerous criminals, not teenage shoplifters, or law-abiding DACA recipients and asylum-seekers who have been profiled and detained but who are innocent.
Edward Kissam is a leading researcher and advocate for strategies to deal with health issues impacting immigrant communities. He has led research on farmworker and immigrant issues sponsored by the Department of Labor, the Commission on Agricultural Workers, and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture. He is also a trustee of the WKF Charitable Giving Fund.
