Laken Riley Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, Laken Riley was, by all accounts, a remarkable young woman, whose life was tragically cut short by a horrific act that should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. My heart goes out to her family and loved ones who grieve her death.

I understand, as a mother myself, fully why in the face of such senseless violence, especially against someone so young, there is an urge to do something, anything, to feel like you are actually helping to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, this bill does nothing to fix the immigration system or to prevent future tragedies like this. It is simply an attempt to score cheap political points off of a tragic death, and in the process, it unfairly sweeps up many more innocent lives with no due process.

Let us be clear: This is the Republican playbook over and over again. Scare people about immigrants, never propose anything that actually solves an outdated and arcane immigration system that desperately needs Congress to allocate resources and update legal pathways to make the immigration system work for everyone.

My Republican colleagues simply want to preserve a broken immigration system as a campaign issue so that they can scapegoat and demonize immigrants all to distract the American people from their real goals of making working people pay for another Republican tax scam that benefits billionaires and the wealthiest.

Just look at the rules package that they just passed. Out of the 12 bills included in that, not a single one does anything to secure the border, to fix the broken immigration system, to lower costs for working people, to address the housing crisis, tackle the extraordinary levels of income inequality in this country, or tamp down on inflation.

Those were the promises of the Trump campaign, but not a single one of those things is actually included in the first bills that they are bringing to the floor without hearings.

Let's talk about what this bill actually does. This bill goes far beyond subjecting those who are convicted to or admit to committing a theft offense to mandatory detention. What this bill actually does is subject any undocumented immigrant to mandatory detention for merely being arrested or charged with committing an act of theft, larceny, or shoplifting, along with those who are convicted or who admit to committing such acts.

Under this bill, a DACA or TPS recipient could be subjected to mandatory detention for crimes that are extremely low-level or for something that is not even a crime without even having had a fair day in court, without a conviction.

Let's be clear, we are talking about people who have been in this country for decades. Many of us in Congress are parents. Imagine your child is with a group of kids grabbing an after-school snack at a 7- Eleven and one of them chooses to just snitch a little candy bar off the shelf.

The shop owner calls the police, and all the kids are arrested for shoplifting. If your child is a DACA recipient, someone who has lived here nearly their entire life, they are now subject to mandatory detention under this bill.

Unfortunately, there are countless real-life examples of people getting wrongfully arrested for crimes that they didn't commit. In 2019, a man in New Jersey was arrested for shoplifting and trying to hit a police officer with a car because facial recognition software falsely identified him as the perpetrator.

He spent 10 days in jail, even though he was actually 30 miles away from where the crime was committed. If he had been a DACA or a TPS recipient, and this bill had been enacted, he would be subject to mandatory immigration detention even though he was innocent of the crime of which he was accused.

People deserve to have their day in court and are innocent until proven guilty. That seems to be something that the majority has forgotten or doesn't seem to care about unless the alleged criminal is the President-elect.

The upcoming administration is poised to bring back their no-priority immigration enforcement priority guidelines in which a convicted murderer would be the same priority for deportation as an undocumented mom who has been living in this country for 20 years.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, imagine how much money a sweeping mandatory detention proposal like this will cost the Federal Government at a time when Republicans are talking a big game about cutting budgets, but not this one. Why? Because this is a great boon to those for-profit detention companies who make enormous profits for mandatory detention when there are far more effective and cheaper ways to address the issue.

Who pays for all this? The taxpayers. Even in a Republican trifecta, ICE has limited resources to detain and remove folks. However, in this bill, like President Trump's enforcement priorities, we seek to use those resources on people who committed low-level crimes or even no crime at all. That makes no one safer and costs a lot of money.

Finally, this bill also bizarrely attempts to give State attorneys general the authority to try and stop the administrations from carrying out important policy priorities by giving them standing to sue in Federal court under various sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That entire section of the bill, likely unconstitutional.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this overly broad, deeply flawed legislation.

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