AZ Dems support federal immigration bill critics call ‘extreme’

The Laken Riley Act — named for the Georgia nursing school student killed by an undocumented Venezuelan man last year — passed the U.S. House on Jan. 6, with 48 Democrats joining Republicans in advancing the bill. In the Senate, 31 Democrats and all Republicans voted Thursday to begin debate on this bill, which critics say would actually undermine efforts to deport more dangerous criminals.

Arizona Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, a co-sponsor, announced they’ll support the bill in the name of “border security,” though the legislation provides no resources or additional enforcement at the southern border.

The Arizona Daily Star requested an interview with Gallego on Monday, Jan. 6, and also emailed questions about critics’ concerns about the bill. Gallego’s office responded with a general statement on Thursday that did not mention the legislation.

“Arizonans don’t want to replace chaos at the border with chaos in our communities caused by mass deportations,” Gallego said in the statement. “I am committed to working in the Senate with Democrats and Republicans alike to secure our border and reform our immigration system.”

Riley’s killer, Jose Antonio Ibarra, who entered the U.S. without authorization in 2022, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in November, after his conviction for murder, kidnapping and aggravated assault with intent to rape, among other offenses, the Associated Press reported.

Attorneys say undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes such as rape and murder, as well as repeat lesser offenses, already face mandatory detention and deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

But because Ibarra had previously been arrested for shoplifting and released, legislators focused the Laken Riley Act on that offense.

Critics say the bill undermines the right to due process, a cornerstone of the U.S. justice system, and risks prolonged detention of innocent people, while needlessly diverting resources from ICE’s efforts to detain and deport more dangerous criminals.

Current U.S. law gives immigration officials and judges discretion to release low-level offenders on bond if deemed not to be a threat to public safety. Taking that away is “an extreme step,” said Alba Jaramillo of Tucson’s Coalición de Derechos Humanos, and co-executive director of the Immigration Law and Justice Network.

“The only people that will benefit from this are the corporations that fund mass incarceration,” she said.

Staffing and detention space limitations mean it’s already impossible to hold everyone subject to mandatory detainment under U.S. law, said attorney Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

“It’s just not possible,” she said. “With this (Laken Riley) act, increasing the population that is meant to be detained does not change the on-the-ground situation of not enough resources to detain the people who are already supposed to be detained.”

Axios reported Friday that ICE told legislators in December the Laken Riley Act could require detention of 60,000 more people and without $3 billion in emergency funding for additional beds, would force the release of tens of thousands of people, including those who could pose a risk to the public.

The National Immigration Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income immigrants, calls the bill “duplicative.”

“The Department of Homeland Security already has statutory authority to detain any undocumented person facing deportation proceedings including those charged with a criminal offense,” the center said in a Jan. 6 statement. “What the bill does is apply ‘mandatory detention,’ requiring detention without any opportunity to even request release on bond.”

There’s no time limit in the legislation, so someone accused of shoplifting as a teenager decades ago could also be incarcerated, said Jesse Evans-Schroeder, a Tucson immigration lawyer with a focus on deportation defense.

“It just seems like political grandstanding that is going to have very real, very tangible effects on countless individuals,” Evans-Schroeder said.

Evans-Schroeder said she has an undocumented client, a domestic violence victim, whose U.S. citizen husband controlled the household’s money. Out of “desperation,” the woman stole diapers for her baby, and was arrested and charged with shoplifting. Desperate situations like that of this client, who is currently in a diversion program as she faces removal proceedings, are the most common scenario among undocumented people who commit petty theft, she said.

Lawmakers unresponsive to questions

Lesser-known provisions in the bill give state attorneys general “unprecedented authority” to seek a court order on immigration policy, such as one compelling the federal government to ban U.S. visas for a country that refuses to accept U.S. deportations, said Tucson immigration attorney Mo Goldman.

Many legislators seem to support the bill because “all they see is the name Laken Riley,” he said. “It’s a way of taking this poor woman’s name and using it as the basis to sweep up as many undocumented persons as possible.”

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, also expressed support for the bill on Wednesday, posting on X, formerly Twitter, “The Laken Riley Act is an important step forward that will help keep our communities safe and secure our border.”  

Neither Gallego, Kelly nor Hobbs directly responded to the Star’s emailed questions about critics’ concerns for due process, and concerns about a flood of litigation that would stem from giving states broad standing to sue the federal government.

Kelly, whose office said he was unavailable for an interview, said in an email that he supports the act because “federal authorities need to protect our communities from criminals. What I won’t support are President Trump’s mass deportation ideas that go against our values and threaten to rip apart Arizona families, including folks who have been studying, working, and contributing to our communities for years. I will continue working with my Republican colleagues to effectively secure our border and fix our broken immigration system in a comprehensive way.”

Kelly’s office said he hopes to improve the bill through a bipartisan process.

Riley’s killer Ibarra had been detained twice by local police for minor offenses, including shoplifting, after Border Patrol released him from custody in 2022 following his unauthorized entry to the U.S.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told Newsweek that ICE was unable to place detainers on Ibarra both times he was arrested because he was released too quickly, so it wasn’t likely agents would have been able to detain him anyway.

Democrats shift on immigration

Since President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election on a promise of mass deportation, some Democrats have been moving to the right on immigration and border issues, seeking to avoid accusations of being soft on immigration, said Michael Kagan, immigration law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

But legislating to appease public opinion is risky, especially when it comes to immigration: Polling on immigration is often contradictory and “thermostatic,” tending to move in the opposite direction of current policy, Kagan said.

“The public is almost never happy with immigration policy,” he said. Under President Joe Biden, public opinion has swung against immigrants, “reflecting the idea that Biden is too lenient,” Kagan said. But under Trump, support for immigrants grew in reaction to the sense that Trump was too harsh, he said. 

“A politician who looks at polls taken in 2024 to decide how to strategically act in 2025 and 2026 might be making a mistake,” Kagan said. “The one thing that has been constant is the volatility in how Americans are reacting on immigration policy.” 

Democrats seem to have stopped fighting for comprehensive immigration reform, including pathways to citizenship and legal immigration, that has been needed for decades, Jaramillo said.

“The move in the Democratic Party has been to criminalize immigrants, to deport immigrants and to prohibit entry to the United States,” she said. “It’s like they’re trying to out-Trump Trump.”

Current ICE guidance from the Biden administration prioritizes removal of people who are threats to national security or public safety, and recent border crossers, which is in line with public opinion: Even those who say they support “mass deportation” usually want deportations to focus on recent border-crossers or people with criminal records, not long-time residents immersed in their communities.

“Republican states have had success convincing people they’re only talking about new arrivals or people with criminal records” when they say “mass deportation,” Kagan said. “But when you look at the numbers, if they only deport people with criminal records, they won’t have deported significantly larger numbers.”

Many affected by the Laken Riley Act would be long-time residents with the resources to hire attorneys and fight their cases from within detention, further burdening the overwhelmed immigration court system, which now has 3.7 million pending cases, Evans-Schroeder said. 

Even for those who ultimately won their case, families would be upended and potentially bankrupted by the process, she said.

“Their lives will fall apart because this person is detained and trying to fight for their right to stay here. It has huge ripple effects,” she said. 

Decades of underfunding for the overburdened court system means recently arrived asylum seekers are receiving hearing dates scheduled years in the future due to the court system’s backlog. Once they face a judge, most asylum seekers who entered the U.S. outside a port of entry will ultimately be deported under Biden’s May 2023 “circumvention of lawful pathways” rule. The rule required asylum seekers to use the CBP One mobile application to enter the U.S. at an official port.

Appropriately resourcing the asylum system would actually address challenges at the border amid a global rise in forced displacement, which the Laken Riley Act doesn’t address, Evans-Schroeder said.

“Thats’s where we need change,” she said. “I just don’t believe there’s a legitimate need for this kind of increased criminalization of immigrants.”

Violent crime down

Polling of Trump supporters reflects widespread belief that immigrants drive crime, despite studies consistently showing the opposite.

In a September Pew Research Center poll, 92% of Trump supporters surveyed said immigrants living in the U.S. illegally worsen crime, compared with 37% of supporters of then-candidate Kamala Harris.

Widespread research has found immigrant communities, including undocumented immigrants, have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans. First-generation immigrants in particular are often fleeing violence themselves and seeking to make a new life in the U.S., and so tend to avoid any run-ins with law enforcement, researchers say.

Last fall, Trump and some Republicans misrepresented data from ICE’s “non-detained docket,” falsely claiming 13,000 people convicted of homicide had entered the U.S. without authorization during Biden’s term and been released into the U.S.

In fact, ICE’s “non-detained” docket lists convicted criminals who aren’t in ICE custody, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t detained somewhere: Most of those on the non-detained docket list are serving time in prison, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute. Others had already served their sentence and have routine check-ins with ICE, or can’t be removed because their home countries won’t accept U.S. deportations.

Trump also falsely claimed all those on the docket were released during the Biden administration, when the docket in fact covered crimes committed over the past half-century and includes criminals released in Trump’s first term, he said.

According to the Real-Time Crime Index, crime data from 300 cities show a decline in violent crime since 2022, even amid a dramatic increase in migrant arrivals at the southern border in 2023.

Basing policy on outlier cases simply because they involve an undocumented immigrant, like Laken Riley’s murderer, isn’t an effective way to combat crime, Kagan said.

“To have public-safety policy focused on, ‘First we have to get rid of the immigrants,’ is sort of like saying, ‘First we have to get rid of left-handed people,'” Kagan said. “Do some left-handed people commit heinous crimes? I’ll go with yes. But that’s a completely random fact. Focusing on that random fact (to make policy) doesn’t actually make anybody safer, because being left-handed never had anything to do with it.”