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Laken Riley Act passes US House, sending anti-immigrant bill to Trump | Trump administration

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The US House on Wednesday gave final approval to a bill requiring the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, sending the proposal to Donald Trump’s desk and giving the new president his first legislative victory as he presses his hardline immigration agenda on multiple fronts.

The House vote was 263 to 158, with 46 Democrats joining every present Republican in supporting the Laken Riley Act, named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan national who was in the US unlawfully. The House vote came two days after the US Senate passed the legislation in a vote of 64 to 35, with a dozen Democratic members backing the bill.

Under the bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) would be required to detain undocumented immigrants charged with crimes such as “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting”. It would also allow state attorneys general to sue the federal government if they believed their states had been harmed by its failure to enforce immigration laws.

The House vote followed a heated hour-long floor debate, in which Democrats argued that the measure would “do nothing to fix the immigration crisis in America” and would instead result in racial profiling and fear-mongering. Republicans countered that the measure would save lives.

Senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican and leading sponsor of the legislation, hailed it as the “most significant immigration enforcement and border security related bill” to be passed by Congress in decades. She said it would be the first bill Trump would sign as the 47th president.

The measure does not include any new funding, even though US Immigration and Customs Enforcement warned lawmakers earlier this month that the agency did not have the existing resources to implement it.

The notable bipartisan support for the bill underscores the pressure some Democrats are under to move to the right on immigration after Republicans narrowly won the White House and both chambers of Congress in November. But progressives laced into Democrats, accusing the party of “caving” to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.

“Reinforcing Republicans’ anti-immigrant messaging and handing them political wins without a fight is not a plan,” said Mari Urbina, managing director of the progressive group, Indivisible. She added: “Immigration policy is a messaging playground for Republicans who use immigrants as scapegoats to expand their power but never offer real solutions, and Democrats should not play.”

Juliana Macedo do Nascimento of United We Dream Action, a youth-led immigrant rights groups, called the Democratic votes “shameful beyond words”.

“It is because of their political cowardice and their inability to even read the legislation in full and understand its consequences, that people in states like Arizona, Nevada and Michigan will be deported after being arrested for something like petty theft, without conviction and without their due process rights,” she said.

Immigrant rights and civil rights groups have expressed additional concerns about how the bill could undermine federal authority and empower Trump to carry out his plan for a mass-deportation program, with opponents arguing that it ignores the principle that someone charged with a crime has not been convicted and is entitled to due process.

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“This is an extreme and reactive bill that will authorize the largest expansion of mandatory detention we have seen in decades, sweeping in children, Dreamers, parents of US-citizen children and other longtime members of their communities who even Ice thinks should not be detained,” Sarah Mehta, senior border policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said last week as the bill made its way through Congress.

“This legislation offers no solutions to improve our immigration system, and we thank the senators who stood up for immigrant communities and due process and voted against this harmful, expensive bill – a bill that will not make us safer.”

Despite those concerns, Trump is expected to swiftly sign the bill once it reaches his desk, making it the first law of his second term. Trump has already used his executive authority to declare a national emergency at the US-Mexico border and call for an end to birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the 14th amendment of the constitution.

That latter proposal has sparked a wave of lawsuits from Democratic-led states and civil rights groups, which may foreshadow many protracted legal battles over Trump’s immigration policies for the next four years.

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