Inside the intriguing coalition of House Dems who supported the Laken Riley Act
48 members—more than a quarter of them freshmen—voted for a bill that would require the feds detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged for theft in the US.
First Things First
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome to Once Upon a Hill. Former President Jimmy Carter arrived during a ceremony at the Capitol this afternoon. Public viewing in the Rotunda will start at approximately 7:30 p.m. Carter’s remains will lie in state until Thursday morning.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) placed a wreath on President Carter’s casket on behalf of the Senate.
“He never stopped serving others until his final day,” Schumer said of Carter during a floor speech this morning. “America was lucky to have him as a citizen, as a president, and as a moral compass of our time.”
House Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu was offered a similar tribute this afternoon.
“He was a great man. He was a good man, a graduate of the Naval Academy,” Lieu, who served in the Air Force, told reporters. “He not only was good as president, he did amazing works after he left the presidency. We’re all going to miss him and may he rest in peace.”
In this evening’s issue, inside the tricky Democratic politics of the first bill the House passed this Congress.
But let’s start with Winter Storm Blair, which brought heavy snow to the mid-Atlantic, forced widespread school closures and still has my Hill colleagues and and me all-around miserable that we had to endure the elements instead of enjoying a couple of snow days of our own.
Umair Irfan at Vox reports that science says rising temperatures are to blame for the cold snap:
There’s evidence that—because of climate change—cold Arctic air may be more likely to break containment in the northernmost reaches of the planet and escape southward, bringing frigid temperatures to lower latitudes like the continental United States.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the fact that global average temperatures are rising does not preclude bouts of cold, and for some Arctic-driven storms, it could exacerbate them. Scientists are examining the mechanisms connecting humanity’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, the far north, and storms like Blair. They’re revealing a complicated picture that shows some of the most profound consequences of climate change occur in the chilliest parts of the planet and during the coolest times of year.
As average temperatures rise rapidly, their effects are manifesting in surprising ways, but with more observations and better forecasting tools, storms like Blair don’t have to be so deadly and destructive.
In related news, Zoë Schlanger reports for The Atlantic that global warming is moving faster than the best climate models can keep up with.
That’s definitely not good.
The Evening Report
Four dozen House Democrats joined all 216 voting House Republicans to pass a bill that would require the federal government to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with theft in the US.
The bill, named after Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered last February while she was jogging at the University of Georgia by a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had unlawfully entered the country and previously been arrested on theft and shoplifting charges, also allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government for perceived violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The House passed a similar bill last Congress with support from 37 Democrats. The uptick in Democratic backing is notable because although members aren’t facing the immediate political pressure of an election year, immigration remains a top concern among Americans. (A new poll from the AP/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that the share of Americans who cite it as a top issue the government should address has risen 12 points since last year.)
The intrigue extends beyond the mere number of supporting Democrats when you consider the makeup of the coalition. 30 members voted for the bill last year. But of the remaining 18 yea votes, five are incumbents: Reps. Brendan Boyle (Pa.), Val Hoyle (Ore.), Lucy McBath (Ga.), Terri Sewell (Ala.) and Ritchie Torres (N.Y.). But most notably, 13 first-term House Democrats—eight of whom flipped Republican seats in 2024—voted in favor of the bill too, representing almost 40 percent of the freshman class: Juanita Bynum (Ore.), Shomari Figures(Ala.), Laura Gillen (N.Y.), Maggie Goodlander(N.H.), Adam Gray (Calif.), John Mannion (N.Y.), April McClain Delaney (Md.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (Mich.), Dave Min (Calif.), Suhas Subramanyam (Va.), Derek Tran (Calif.) and George Whitesides (Calif.).
House Republicans blame Riley’s death on President Joe Biden’s abuse of humanitarian parole, which is a temporary entry permit for noncitizens who are otherwise admissible to the US due to urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. The INA authorized the Secretary of Homeland Security to grant parole at their discretion. In addition to Riley, Biden’s House GOP critics point to incidents in Louisiana, Maryland and Texas where undocumented immigrants have been accused of crimes. (A National Institute of Justice-funded study last September found that, although how often undocumented immigrants commit crimes is not easy to answer, the group is arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.
But Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, led the opposition against the legislation because it weakens due process protections.
“Essentially, it’s the first in a raft of legislation which takes existing immigration laws, which allow for the immediate detention and deportation of people for having committed crimes—in this case, theft and shoplifting—but then it changes it from conviction for those offenses to charges of or arrests for,” Raskin told me ahead of the vote. “So it doesn’t allow the criminal justice system to actually travel down the line and it just says the moment you’re arrested, even if the charges are dropped, you are deportable.”
And while House Democratic leadership didn’t formally whip members against the bill, they argued the measure was House Republicans’s latest attempt to to politicize a tragedy and called on the House GOP to propose a serious solution to the challenges at the southern border.
“We as Democrats, we’re the folks that are actually committed to safety for people and actually committed to addressing sexual assault and sexual violence,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) told me. “The Republicans don’t actually have a clear plan on clearing sexual assault evidence backlogs, on standing up for survivors of all sorts of violence and preventing those crimes. Instead, they, you know, continue to play a messaging battle and just messaging about it rather than actually trying to address.”
Rep. Nikema Williams, a House Democrat who represents a district in the state where Riley was killed, told me that as a public official and mom, she feels awful for her family and can’t imagine the grief they’ve had to deal with.
“But as legislators as members of Congress, we have a responsibility to legislate for the entire country,” she said. “And we need comprehensive immigration reform in this country.”
House Democrats also largely opposed the bill because it includes Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients, which would ratchet up the number of mandatory detentions without increasing funding to carry them out. And they say the provision allowing states to sue cabinet secretaries for INA violations is an attempt to allow conservative AGs to find friendly courts and judges to block or issue nationwide injunctions against Biden-era immigration policies that remain in place.
“That’s a concern of me and its concern of a lot of my colleagues,” House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said of the lack of DACA protections. “We’re going to continue to have robust discussions about immigration policy, about border security. The Democratic Caucus believes in the rule of law. We also believe in a process. We believe in a fundamental principle that people accused of crimes have the ability to respond. And that doesn’t mean that if you’re accused of a crime, you should be deported. That is a concern. And so we believe in the rule of law, but we believe in the process and fundamental principle of our justice system.”
Aguilar also took issue with the process—or lack thereof—that preceded the final floor vote.
“[These are] all bills that were part of Mike Johnson cutting a deal to be speaker. These Republican members went to him and wanted these bills considered many of them without being marked up, without going through the normal process, some of them from last Congress. This is their effort to try to extract something from Mike Johnson,” Aguilar said. “There is not a Committee. I have not been aware of a Rules Committee chair, so they do not have the ability to bring a bill to the floor to have actual debate. When you have actual debate and an actual markup, then at least you open the door to have some amendments and to have some bipartisanship. That’s not what this Republican Conference is interested in right now. We’ll see if that changes.”
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Johnson’s office told me that the speaker was clear he was not cutting any deals to become Speaker and he did not.
The bill will now go to the Senate where, according to my napkin math, it stands a reasonable chance of passage. With full attendance, it will need just eight Democrats to reach the 60-vote, filibuster-proof threshold. (Sen.-elect Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) has not been sworn in yet.)
Two senators—Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.)—voted for the bill when they were in the House. (Gallego said he was reviewing the bill text to ensure the version the Senate will vote on is the one he previously supported.) Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is the first Democratic cosponsor of the Senate version of the bill, which is led by Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), whom Fetterman calls a close personal friend. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) could support the bill to burnish his bipartisan credentials in the state where Riley was murdered and he will be seeking reelection in 2026. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), another incumbent Senate Republicans could target in two years, also plans to support the bill. That would leave the whip count three votes short of passage.
Sen. Schumer, who blocked the bill from floor consideration when he was majority leader last year, declined to comment on how the rest of the Senate Democratic Caucus would approach the vote and said he would wait to see when Sen. Thune schedules it.
In the meantime, Aguilar is still hopeful Congress can somehow reach a bipartisan solution on an issue that has dogged Congress for three decades—if the most extreme members of the House GOP aren’t the ones calling the shots.
“But what we have seen from them is just reciting time and time again anti-immigrant rhetoric and then wrapped in a policy bow that they present. That’s not going to do it,” he said. “There are also very unserious members on the other side of the aisle who have no interest in working in a bipartisan way. They just want to be on Fox News and they just want to be loved by Donald Trump. We will see which House Republicans emerge when it comes to immigration as a policy topic.”
Do you have questions about the new Congress or the incoming Trump presidency? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll report back with answers.
Today in Congress
The House met this morning to debate the Laken Riley Act before an afternoon floor vote.
The Senate met this morning and approved by unanimous consent organizing resolutions formally establishing the majority and minority committee memberships for the new Congress.