Democrats Will Regret Helping to Pass the Laken Riley Act

Opinion|Democrats Will Regret Helping to Pass the Laken Riley Act

Democrats have a terrible habit, during moments of right-wing backlash, of voting for Republican legislation that they don’t seem to truly believe in and eventually live to regret.

The most glaring example is the 2002 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq, passed amid the explosion of jingoist groupthink that dominated American politics after the Sept. 11 attacks. Democratic presidential candidates who’d backed the resolution — John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — would later tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize votes that were almost certainly motivated by political expediency, and which put their imprimatur on a catastrophe.

Another shameful episode was the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. It passed at a time when Democrats were on the defensive; Bill Clinton’s attempt to let gay people serve openly in the military had fallen apart, Newt Gingrich’s Republicans took the House in the 1994 midterms, and the Republican Bob Dole seemed poised to make gay marriage an issue in the coming election. In a weirdly apologetic signing statement, Clinton wrote that the law should not be “understood to provide an excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation against any person on the basis of sexual orientation.” But as Clinton would later acknowledge when calling for its repeal, it did something worse, writing discrimination into law.

A bill called the Laken Riley Act, which overwhelmingly passed the House and could soon pass the Senate, is destined to be another entry in this archive of legislative shame. Given that anger over mass migration contributed to Democrats’ defeat in November, it’s perfectly understandable that some Democrats would tack right on border issues. The Laken Riley Act, however, is the wrong vehicle for proving their moderation. This sweeping bill will upend our immigration system in ways that will outlast Donald Trump’s presidency, ruining lives and handcuffing future Democratic administrations. Democrats who vote for it may dodge right-wing attacks in the next election, but once its true scope becomes clear, they’ll be answering for it for years to come.

The bill is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by Jose Ibarra, an undocumented migrant from Venezuela who had previously been apprehended for crimes including shoplifting and child endangerment. Due in part to Ibarra’s arrest history, the case became a cause célèbre on the right. “The more they get away with and the more we let these criminals go, it just emboldens them, and they step it up,” said Mike Collins, the Georgia Republican who introduced the measure in the House.

If all the bill did was mandate the deportation of migrants convicted of petty theft, it would make sense for many Democrats to back it, if only because there’s so little political upside in defending the rights of undocumented shoplifters. But the bill goes much further than that. It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who are merely arrested for any theft-related crimes, with no provision to free them if the charges are later dropped. (According to Axios, ICE is worried that to make room for those accused of theft, it would have to release others in its custody, including some considered “public safety threats.”)