On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed the Laken Riley Act into law. The legislation expands the federal government’s mandatory detention rules for unauthorized immigrants to include theft-related crimes, like shoplifting, and grants state attorneys general the right to sue the federal government over what they deem as insufficient immigration enforcement.
The bill, named after a Georgia woman killed by an undocumented immigrant, tracks with Trump’s tendency to politicize murders and has been used by right-wingers to engender racist anger toward immigrants, as I wrote last year.
The bill received bipartisan support in the House and Senate, despite civil rights groups and various Democratic lawmakers highlighting its risks of increasing racial profiling and suspending due process for people accused of crimes. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., for example, voted against the bill, telling MSNBC’s Chris Hayes the law means “people are going to be targeted because they’re brown.”
Given how Trump’s immigration officials already appear to be engaging in disturbing profiling — and ensnaring legal U.S. residents in their anti-immigrant round-ups — that seems like a fair prediction.
In a speech to the House last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., (who also voted against the bill) spoke out about its potential risks to due process. “In the wake of tragedy, we are seeing a fundamental erosion of our civil rights,” she said. “In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime — if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting — they would be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court.”
And New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another Democrat who opposed the bill, offered a personal anecdote to MSNBC host Chris Hayes to suggest that those who supported the bill — including fellow Democrats — have made a decision that will tar their legacies.
He said:
I had a nonpolitical person in the Capitol who’s never came up to me and talked about politics, but he looked at me and said Democrats are going to rue the day when they allowed something like that bill we just passed, that allows — literally — Dreamers to be indefinitely detained. Or a child who steals a candy bar. He said this is going to come back in history to really, really haunt those people that supported this bill.
Watch the clip here:
Indeed, Democrats who supported this bill seem to have acquiesced to conservatives’ fear-mongering for the sake of political expediency, and in the process they may have subjected many of their constituents to racial profiling.
Because Republicans now control the Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House, they didn’t need Democratic votes to pass this bill. Democrats could have collectively denounced the bill and advocated for the bipartisan bill they negotiated earlier, which sought to address problems with U.S. immigration laws without seemingly opening the door to the vilification and abuse of immigrants.
But in what was arguably the first test of congressional Democrats’ willingness to confront the conservative movement’s dubious politicking, I think it’s fair to say they failed.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.