The Laken Riley Act is an attempt to target migrants accused of crimes

On By Littum

The first piece of legislation the new Republican-led Congress is sending to President Trump’s desk resets a key priority of his second term: immigration.

The Laken Riley Act, as the bill is known, requires authorities to deport immigrants accused — not yet convicted — of specific crimes if they are in the country illegally.

The adoption of the bill came when Mr. Trump began his promised crackdown on the border with executive orders, presidential memoranda and policy directives to limit the flow of migrants into the country. Republicans have promised that more measures to speed up and expand immigration enforcement will follow.

Democrats raised many concerns about the bill, saying it would unfairly target immigrants whose only crime had been entering the country without permission. But a number of them supported it anyway — a sign of how Democrats are eager to regain ground with voters worried about illegal immigration.

Here’s what you need to know about the bill that is expected to become law soon.

The measure lists specific crimes that could cause a person to be in the United States without permission to be detained and deported. They include burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, assault on a police officer and any crime resulting in death or bodily harm. The bill mandates the detention of people who are arrested, charged or admit to committing such a crime without requiring them to be convicted first.

It also gives state attorneys general the right to sue the U.S. attorney general or the secretary of homeland security if an immigrant of uncertain or disputed legal status who is paroled into the country commits a crime that harms either the state or one of its residents physically or financially , if the value of the damage is more than $100.

Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University in Georgia, was jogging one morning in February 2024 when she was attacked and killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old from Venezuela who had entered the United States in 2022 without permission. Like many others, he was granted temporary permission to stay in the country. Mr. Ibarra was sentenced to life in prison for the crime.

Before Mr. Ibarra killed Mrs. Riley, he had been arrested in connection with a shoplifting case, but was never detained. The legislation aims to encourage the removal of unauthorized immigrants accused of such crimes before they can go on to commit more serious ones. Yet, for the past 150 years, immigrants have been less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States, a study from 2023 completed.

Because the measure only requires a person to be charged or charged with deportation, it is possible, critics have argued, that bystanders to a crime could be harmed by it. During debates on the floor of Congress, Democrats argued that if a group of people were in a store and one chose to shoplift, the police could easily arrest them all before they could find out what happened. Anyone in that group who does not have permission to stay in the country could then face deportation, even if the authorities ultimately determined they had committed no crime.

Democrats raised many concerns with the bill. They argued that it did not have strong enough safeguards to protect people who entered the country illegally but have since been allowed to stay temporarily – such as those who have been able to delay removal because they were brought to United States as children, or people whose countries of origin make them eligible for temporary protected status. Democrats have also argued that the part of the measure that allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government could be unconstitutional — a claim Republicans reject.

But since the 2024 election, in which Republicans retained the House and won the Senate and the presidency amid promises on immigration and border crossings, Democrats have been under tremendous pressure to shift to the right on immigration issues.