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DEMOCRATS WILL REGRET HELPING TO PASS THE LAKEN RILEY ACT  
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Michelle Goldberg
January 13, 2025
New York Times
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_ Democrats have a terrible habit, during moments of right-wing
backlash, of voting for Republican legislation that they don’t seem
to truly believe in and eventually live to regret. The Laken Riley
Act, is such a wrong vehicle. _

Photo credit: Will Oliver/EPA, via Shutterstock // New York Times,

 

Democrats have a terrible habit, during moments of right-wing
backlash, of voting for Republican legislation that they don’t seem
to truly believe in and eventually live to regret.

The most glaring example is the 2002 resolution authorizing military
force against Iraq, passed amid the explosion of jingoist groupthink
that dominated American politics after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Democratic presidential candidates who’d backed the resolution —
John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — would later tie
themselves in knots trying to rationalize votes that were almost
certainly motivated by political expediency, and which put their
imprimatur on a catastrophe.

Another shameful episode was the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which
barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. It
passed at a time when Democrats were on the defensive; Bill
Clinton’s attempt to let gay people serve openly in the military had
fallen apart, Newt Gingrich’s Republicans took the House in the 1994
midterms, and the Republican Bob Dole seemed poised to make gay
marriage an issue in the coming election. In a weirdly apologetic
signing statement
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Clinton wrote that the law should not be “understood to provide an
excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation against any person
on the basis of sexual orientation.” But as Clinton would later
acknowledge when calling for its repeal, it did something worse
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writing discrimination into law.

A bill called the Laken Riley Act, which overwhelmingly passed the
House and could soon pass the Senate, is destined to be another entry
in this archive of legislative shame. Given that anger over mass
migration contributed to Democrats’ defeat in November, it’s
perfectly understandable that some Democrats would tack right on
border issues. The Laken Riley Act, however, is the wrong vehicle for
proving their moderation. This sweeping bill would upend our
immigration system in ways that would outlast Donald Trump’s
presidency, ruining lives and handcuffing future Democratic
administrations. Democrats who vote for it may dodge right-wing
attacks in the next election, but once its true scope becomes clear,
they’ll be answering for it for years to come.

The bill is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered
last year by Jose Ibarra, an undocumented migrant from Venezuela who
had previously been apprehended for crimes including shoplifting and
child endangerment. Due in part to Ibarra’s arrest history, the case
became a cause célèbre on the right. “The more they get away with
and the more we let these criminals go, it just emboldens them, and
they step it up,” said Mike Collins, the Georgia Republican who
introduced the measure in the House.

If all the bill did was mandate the deportation of migrants convicted
of petty theft, it would make sense for many Democrats to back it, if
only because there’s so little political upside in defending the
rights of undocumented shoplifters. But the bill goes much further
than that. It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who
are merely _arrested_ for any theft-related crimes, with no
provision to free them if the charges are later dropped. (According
to Axios
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ICE is worried that to make room for those accused of theft, it would
have to release others in its custody, including some considered
“public safety threats.”)

The bill applies to many immigrants who are authorized to be here,
including Dreamers and those with temporary protected status. And the
legislation contains no exemption for minors. As Ilya Somin, a law
professor at George Mason University, told me, the Laken Riley Act
could mandate the indefinite detention of a juvenile child of
asylum-seekers arrested for swiping a candy bar, even if he or she
didn’t do it.

One of the act’s other provisions would give state officials
unheard-of power over immigration policy. If the bill passes, a state
attorney general could sue to block all visas to people from
“recalcitrant countries” that don’t fully cooperate with the
United States in accepting deportees, a list that includes China,
India and Russia. This section of the Laken Riley Act may not matter
much when Trump is in office; Republican attorneys general probably
won’t want to challenge the president, and Democrats are unlikely to
demand harsher immigration crackdowns. But if we ever have another
Democratic president, it’s easy to picture the most conservative
state prosecutors suing to block the issuance of visas to, say, people
from China. Immigration policy would be subject to a chaotic fight in
the federal courts.

Though the measure sailed through the House last week, Democrats could
still block it in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to overcome a
filibuster. Alas, that seems unlikely to happen. Last week, only nine
Senate Democrats voted against proceeding to debate the bill on the
Senate floor. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Ruben Gallego of
Arizona are co-sponsors of it, and several other swing-state Democrats
have already announced plans to vote for it. Fetterman told reporters
last week that fellow Democrats had experienced a “blinding flash of
common sense.”

But the Democrats’ failure to muster opposition to this bill isn’t
common sense, it’s cowardice. Given the lessons of the last
election, it’s wise for Democrats to defy pro-immigrant interest
groups when those groups make politically insupportable demands like
abolishing ICE or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. That’s
very different, however, from completely capitulating to Republican
demagogy with little evident concern for the long-term consequences.

Someday, when public opinion on immigration shifts again, Democrats
who voted for this cruel and misguided bill will have a hard time
justifying it. If only they could save themselves and us the trouble.

_[MICHELLE GOLDBERG has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is
the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.]_

* Laken Riley Act
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* John Fetterman
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* Ruben Gallego
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* GOP
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* MAGA
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* Immigration
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