Just days into his second presidency, President Donald Trump signed his first piece of legislation: the Laken Riley Act, which requires the government to seek out and arrest illegal immigrants who commit theft and violent offenses. Named after a college student senselessly killed by an undocumented immigrant after a prior arrest, the president pushed for passage “to prevent senseless tragedies.”
But going after a small number of criminal fugitives will not allow the president’s team to hit its sky-high deportation targets. Whether intentionally or through incompetence, the Trump administration is violating its own law, allowing criminals to re-offend while it terrorizes peaceful immigrants. The result is the administration’s arrest numbers soar.
This past weekend provided the latest evidence. Immigrants who had already racked up a series of arrests were accused of shooting an off-duty customs agent. These are exactly the people the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is required to prioritize under the Laken Riley Act. Yet DHS failed to do so.
The Laken Riley Act is clear: The Department of Homeland Security “shall effectively and expeditiously take custody” of any illegal immigrant arrested for burglary, theft, or any crime that seriously injures anyone. This weekend’s suspects already had arrests for robbery, grand larceny and serious assaults.
They should have been among the first targets for the new administration, but they were not. As a result, they were free to re-offend.
Incredibly, this is the second time in six months that a DHS employee was a victim of a crime alleged to have been committed by a person whom DHS should have arrested under the Laken Riley Act. In April, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s purse was allegedly stolen by an undocumented immigrant in Washington, D.C., according to law enforcement. He, too, had previous arrests for theft in New York City, including this year during the Trump administration.
The administration often does ask local governments to detain people on its behalf, but it even more frequently does not send officers to get those people into custody. During the first month of this administration, DHS was going to get its targets who were in local custody a minority of the time after it asked local governments to notify it of the people’s releases, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the TRAC research organization.
DHS is most likely just ignoring the law that Trump and Republicans had demanded.
Noem blames “sanctuary city” policies, which prohibit city police from coordinating with DHS, but that does not clear DHS of its failure to enforce the Laken Riley Act. Local police had not detained Laken Riley’s assailant after his prior theft arrest. Hence, the law states that “if the alien is not otherwise detained by Federal, State, or local officials,” federal agents “shall effectively and expeditiously take custody.”
No local sanctuary policy can stop DHS from sending its agents to make these arrests. Even in sanctuary cities, DHS receives notification when authorities arrest people in the country illegally. Even without being tipped off by local governments, ICE can track their court hearings and arrest them, as sometimes happens. More intensive searches are required for people already released. But under the Laken Riley Act, those intensive and difficult searches take priority over DHS’ arrests of noncriminals.
Given the question of whether DHS is even trying to carry out the law, I made a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents detailing how DHS is implementing the Laken Riley Act. DHS’ response? In June, the department told me, “No records responsive to your request were found.”
In other words, DHS is most likely just ignoring the law that Trump and Republicans had demanded — as I predicted it would. Why did I predict that? Because the administration can’t achieve “mass deportation” by targeting criminals. There simply are not “millions and millions” of immigrant criminals, and they are often more difficult to find and arrest than immigrants who play by the rules.
The conservative-leaning Washington Examiner reported in May that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller “eviscerated” DHS officials who said they were prioritizing criminals as required by the Laken Riley Act. “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” he reportedly asked DHS officers. Although ICE disputes the Examiner’s reporting, which was based on ICE officials, other outlets have similar reporting. The New York Post quoted ICE officials last month saying the White House wants “quantity over quality,” which, the officials claim, is “leading them to leave some dangerous criminal illegal migrants on the streets.” More damning is the Wall Street Journal report that Miller denounced DHS’ practice of creating “target lists of immigrants,” a necessary step to identify people who have already committed crimes. Instead, he said they should go out and profile people on the streets and at worksites. That’s what DHS has been doing. Multiple courts have now found DHS has engaged in illegal street profiling of Latinos. As a result, in June, DHS was arresting 4,000 immigrants per week who had no criminal convictions or charges. Only about a third of the convicted “criminals” whom it brought into custody were violent or property criminals, accounting for just less than 10% of all the immigrants it has detained. From the White House’s perspective, it appears to believe there’s little difference between an illegal immigrant mom who is supporting her U.S. citizen children and the serial criminals who shot the customs agent this week, because both might go on to commit serious crimes. But the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act’s logic is the opposite: Focusing on known threats is more likely to protect Americans from future harm. How many crimes will it take for the Trump administration to learn that lesson?
David J. Bier
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. 
