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The Laken Riley Act, which has passed the House with 48 Democrats backing it, would require the Department of Homeland Security to detain undocumented migrants accused of minor crimes like burglary, theft, larceny, and shoplifting, putting them on track to deportation. This is dubious policy: DHS already has the authority to detain such undocumented immigrants; the bill would merely require this. That could give DHS less flexibility to make enforcement decisions in these cases, forcing it to detain people accused of the most minor transgressions even if DHS determines that enforcement resources might be better used elsewhere.
What happened to Laken Riley—a nursing student murdered by undocumented migrant Jose Ibarra after he’d previously committed minor crimes—was a horror, and Ibarra has rightly received a life sentence for it. But as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, it’s extraordinarily rare for low-level offenders to go on to commit murder; now Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be required to detain every such offender, a potentially huge waste of resources that could be used to pursue more serious criminals. His case should not be the basis for such massive policy changes.
Regardless, another part of the bill is potentially worse than its detention mandate. It grants state attorneys general standing to bring lawsuits against certain specific federal immigration policies if they claim their states are damaged by those policies, and to seek “injunctive relief” against them.
