House GOP passes Laken Riley Act with help from 46 Dems
The bill now goes to President Trump’s desk to be the first he signs into law in his second term.
After spending the first two days of his second term scrawling his signature on stacks of executive orders, President Donald Trump will finally get to sign a bill into law. And it’s on an issue that dominated the campaign trail: immigration.
The House passed the Laken Riley Act this afternoon by a 263–156 vote, giving the president and congressional Republicans an early win a week into unified GOP control of the federal government.
The House had to vote again on the bill because the Senate adopted separate amendments to require undocumented immigrants who attack police officers to be detained and to require undocumented immigrants to be deported if they commit a crime that results in death or serious bodily injury.
46 House Democrats joined all voting Republicans in support of the measure, many of them hailing from competitive districts or serving their first terms in Congress after campaigning to crack down on border security. That’s two fewer than who voted for a previous version of the bill earlier this month.
But critics of the bill say the bill not only makes the mere accusation of a theft-related crime a deportable offense, it doesn’t provide protections to Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status recipients.
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) told me she understood why Dreamers would be worried after Democrats who said they would always protect the children of undocumented immigrants who were born in the US. (Republicans blocked proposed Democratic amendments to exempt the two vulnerable groups from enforcement of the bill.)
“They have my complete support and commitment and there are many of us in the Democratic Party who still will continue to fight for them.”
Escobar declined to comment when I asked her to name those Democrats.
The El Paso congresswoman also said the section of the bill that allows state attorneys general to sue federal immigration authorities for alleged violations relating to the detention of undocumented immigrants is problematic.
“It’s already criminal to attack a law enforcement officer. That’s not new in terms of who's eligible for deportation or should be deported or whatever,” Escobar said. “But it’s this empowerment of states that they should have fixed and they didn’t. And so that tells me that the Republicans’ intention is to make immigration law more of a mess—and they're using this [bill] as a vehicle to do that.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) told a small group of reporters this afternoon that Democrats must aggressively push back against misinformation on flawed bills designed to demonize immigrant communities and force vulnerable members into tough votes.
“Our country right now is flooded with so many lies about these bills—many of those lies are being pumped out by the richest man on earth who has bought Twitter—that Democrats need to unite around the truth and need to get back to communicating to the American people that that we are for safety, that we are for a humane and orderly and legal immigration system, and that what they're hearing from Elon Musk and Donald Trump is just lies.”
Casar said that he’s received questions unrelated to the bill, which he argues prove the effectiveness of the misinformation campaigns on culture-war issues.
“So for us to reunite our party, which is the Progressive Caucus’s goal, to reunite our party around a rational, legal and humane immigration system, we have to combat the flood of lies,” he said. “In this case, I don't just mean like, you know, the way that people talk about disinformation, misinformation. There is a purposeful campaign of massive lies being pumped out by the richest people on Earth who are trying to monopolize our information system. And it is really, frankly, up to us and also the free press to communicate what's actually in these bills.”
The Senate passed the bill on Monday evening with 12 Democrats—including Georgia’s Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—joining all voting Republicans in favor.
Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), another Democrat who supported the measure, 11 of his colleagues in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) asking Republicans to work on standalone immigration legislation instead of using the budget reconciliation process to advance border security measures without Democratic support. Republicans are likely to ignore this request since a bipartisan bill would require a level of compromise that party-line reconciliation bills don’t.
I can count on you to keep me informed. This is so needed!!!