Opinion | Democrats will regret helping pass the Laken Riley bill

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

If the bill merely mandated the deportation of migrants convicted of petty theft, it would make sense that many Democrats would support it, if only because there is so little political upside to defending the rights of undocumented thieves. But the bill goes much further than that. It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who are alone arrested for any crimes related to theft, with no provision for release if the charges are later dropped. (According to Axios, ICE is concerned that to make room for those charged with theft, it would have to release others in its custody, including some considered “threats to public safety.”)

The bill applies to many immigrants who are authorized to be here, including Dreamers and those with Temporary Protected Status. And the law does not contain an exemption for minors. As Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told me, Laken Riley’s law could mandate the indefinite detention of a minor child of an asylum seeker arrested for taking a box of candy, even if he or she didn’t do it.

One of the other provisions of the bill would give government officials unprecedented power over immigration policy. If the bill passes, the attorney general could sue to block all visas to people from “recalcitrant countries” that do not 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 are unlikely to challenge the president, and Democrats are unlikely to demand tougher immigration crackdowns. But if we ever have another Democratic president, it’s easy to imagine the most conservative attorney generals suing to block visas for, say, people from China. Immigration policy would be the subject of a chaotic fight in the federal courts.

Although the measure passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives last week, Democrats could still block it in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Unfortunately, it looks like that won’t happen. Last week, only nine Senate Democrats voted against continuing debate on the bill in the Senate. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Ruben Gallego of Arizona are co-sponsors, 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.”