'Don't Be Fooled': Laken Riley Act Not About Crime by Migrants—It's a Right-Wing Power Grab

With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Laken Riley Act on Friday, immigrant rights advocates are warning that—despite claims from proponents that the bill is aimed at protecting American communities from violent crime—supporters of the legislation are actually advancing a dangerous "Trojan horse" and securing a power grab for xenophobic right-wing authorities.

The bill is named after Laken Riley, a Georgia woman who was killed last February while she was jogging. Jose Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, was convicted of her murder in November, and the case was a focal point of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign last year.

But as Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of immigrant rights group America's Voice, said Thursday, the bill "is filled with unrelated and sweeping measures that won't improve public safety."

Central provisions in the legislation, which passed in the House on Tuesday with the support of 37 Democrats along with the entire Republican caucus, would require immigration officers to detain undocumented immigrants who are accused of theft, including shoplifting—an apparent response to the fact that Ibarra was cited for shoplifting in Georgia but was not detained before he killed Riley.

Critics have expressed outrage over the provision, with Cárdenas saying it would trample "important due process principles—greenlighting detention and deportation for those accused, rather than convicted of low-level crimes."

"It's no surprise Republicans are continuing to exploit a horrific act of violence and portray immigrants as dangerous threats to America, despite the reality that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born," said Cárdenas. "And it also should be no surprise to any close observers of right-wing politics that the bill being pushed this week doesn't seek to improve public safety or even focus on public safety threats."

At Arizona Republic, editor Elvia Díaz advised readers, "Don't be fooled by soundbites."

"Republicans and now Democrats, too, want you to believe the Laken Riley Act is about deporting shoplifters," she wrote. "It's a power grab by states to dismantle federal authority over immigration enforcement."

In a column at MSNBC on Wednesday, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote that Republicans pushing the bill are asking the question: "Who runs the U.S. immigration system?"

The answer, backed up by numerous courts, has been the federal government, but the bill would give broad new authorities to state officials, such as attorneys general, to file legal challenges in order to have specific immigrants detained and to force the State Department to block visas from countries that won't accept immigrants who are deported.

"Giving states a veto power over thousands of decisions made every day by federal law enforcement officers and leaders will complicate immigration issues in every community and threaten to set off international incidents which could hurt U.S. interests around the globe," wrote Reichlin-Melnick.

The visa provision could impact countries such as China and India, which have "historically not cooperated fully with the United States on deportations," and where more than 1.8 million immigrant and short-term visas were issued to nationals in 2023.

"Because the United States is so intertwined with these countries, administrations of both parties have been unwilling to threaten blanket visa bans as a punishment for not accepting deportees," wrote Reichlin-Melnick. "Yet should the Laken Riley Act become law, that decision may no longer be in the hands of our nation's top diplomats and law enforcement officers; it could be in the hands of a single federal district court judge in Texas or Louisiana."

He continued:

What could this look like in practice? Imagine a person from China living in Texas on an H-1B visa who commits an offense that leads to a deportation order. If China does not accept the deportation, [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton could go to court seeking to force the federal government to ban all visas from China (or maybe just all H-1B visas) without having to worry about taking the blame for the economic or diplomatic fallout to the United States.

"What happened to Laken Riley was a terrible tragedy, and the perpetrator has been sentenced to life in prison for his heinous acts," wrote Reichlin-Melnick on Wednesday. "But just as Willie Horton's bad acts decades ago were not a justification for supercharging a system of mass incarceration, the heinous acts of Jose Ibarra should not be an excuse to flip our system of constitutional governance on its head and empower individual states and federal judges to run immigration law."

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who opposed the bill this week, said he has heard from "a lot of people who say they support this bill, but who don't seem to know what it really does."

"For example, if this bill is signed into law, a 12-year-old kid brought here by a parent could be LOCKED IN ICE DETENTION if they are accused—not even convicted, simple accused—of stealing a candy bar," McGovern said in a post on X, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement..

Kylie Cheung of Jezebel pointed out that while Republicans have held the Laken Riley Act up as essential legislation to protect women from violence, "these lawmakers don't care about women's safety or high rates of femicide perpetrated by people with citizenship—they've cut all actual resources for victims. They just want to gut basic civil liberties."

Immigration attorney Ben Winograd of the Immigrant & Refugee Appellate Center offered a hypothetical scenario under the bill: "Imagine a man who is a U.S. citizen marries a woman who entered the country illegally. He abuses her constantly, and after learning that she intends to leave him, he calls the police and (falsely) claims that she stole some of his property."

"If the police arrest the woman, she would be subject to mandatory detention while in removal proceedings—even if the police determined that the accusation was bogus," said Winograd. "The Laken Riley Act would allow any person with a grudge against an undocumented immigrant to make them subject to indefinite mandatory detention simply by leveling a false accusation of theft."

All the Senate Republicans are sponsoring the bill, which was cleared for a vote on Thursday, with Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) joining them. In order to overcome a filibuster the GOP needs just six more Democrats to support the legislation.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), one of nine senators who opposed advancing the bill on Thursday, said he is in favor of "bipartisan action to fix our broken immigration system."

"I stand ready to work across the aisle to get it done," he said. "Let's start from a foundation grounded in our Constitution."