Stop Illegal Entry Act of 2025
Floor Speech
I congratulate Mr. Knott on his first bill coming to the floor of the House.
The administration and ICE say that they are targeting the most hardened criminals, the worst of the worst, but the numbers now suggest a different story. Roughly half of the people who have been arrested by ICE have no violent criminal history and no criminal history other than being undocumented.
Most migrants, of course, are coming due to poverty, insecurity, violence in their home country, and authoritarianism at home. In fact, the two most common crimes committed by people who have been detained by ICE are being here without documentation and traffic offenses.
Now, the President has said that his administration wants to remove and deport people who commit crimes after they illegally enter the country, but the gentleman's legislation moves in exactly the opposite direction. If this bill were passed into law, it would imprison people for long sentences, even potentially for life, just for having entered the country on an undocumented basis, several times, as the gentleman says.
Obviously, if someone commits a murder or rape, they are going to be prosecuted for murder or rape, so the bite of this bill is with respect to people who just keep reentering our country without permission.
Now, it would require that people who are immediately removable and deportable, undocumented immigrants, must spend 5 or 10 years in overcrowded and overburdened Bureau of Prisons facilities in our country at a huge cost to American taxpayers--more than $150, and in many cases $200 a day, which comes to hundreds of millions of dollars when you multiply it by the people that would be affected--before they can be removed from the country.
That is the odd part of this bill, that we have people who have entered unlawfully who have no documentation to be here. They are removable. They are deportable, but we are insisting that they stay here and be imprisoned and punished here for the crime of having entered illegally.
This would undoubtedly be good for the owners of all the private detention facilities and prisons who are getting rich off of laws like this, but it would fail the rest of us.
Under 8 U.S.C. 1325, today, entering the U.S. without inspection is already a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and a sentence of up to 6 months in prison with enhancements that can increase the maximum sentence up to 2 years. Under 8 U.S.C. 1326, if you unlawfully reenter the country or are found to be here in the United States following a removal or denial of admission, this is already a felony punishable by up to 2 years in prison with enhancements that can increase the maximum sentence already to as high as 20 years in prison for those who were ordered removed following a conviction for certain offenses.
The gentleman's bill would increase the penalty for people who enter without inspection from 6 months to 2 years for a first offense, and then if you reenter without documentation for up to 5 years, and in certain circumstances, potentially up to life. You could be held for life for a consecutive illegal entry into our country.
The bill provides even for a potential life sentence in Federal prison for merely entering the country unlawfully with no other criminal conduct required. There are obviously armed robbers and rapists and even murderers who have done less time than that.
Obviously, we don't want these people entering the country illegally. That is why the solution is to toughen the border. We had a bipartisan compromise to toughen and fortify the border with the hiring of hundreds more border officers and judges. It was coming through the Senate. That was the one at the end of 2024 that was sailing through Congress when President Trump decided to sink that legislation and said, essentially, that he didn't want a border compromise bill for more effective enforcement there, that he wanted a border crisis to run against.
There has been a consensus between the parties for several years that mandatory minimums do not effectively reduce crime and do not improve public safety. They strip judges of their ability to exercise fact- based discretion and impose sentences that fit the circumstances of the case, frustrating their ability to consider mitigating and complicating factors, imposing a one-size-fits-all straitjacket that leads to often disproportionate and inflexible prison sentences.
This is why the Judicial Conference itself opposes mandatory minimums. This is why you don't have judges at the border demanding the gentleman's legislation. This is why the Brennan Center opposes it. This is why Right On Crime has opposed mandatory minimums and so on.
Study after study has shown that mandatory minimums don't work to deter criminal conduct. We know from a report issued by the Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice that the certainty of being caught and quickly punished, not the severity or length of the sentence, is what deters criminal conduct. Increasing and mandating harsh, lengthy sentences will not deter illegal reentry, but strengthening the border will do that.
According to The Washington Post, the administration is actually pressuring Governors today to commute the sentences of immigrants who are in prison under the current framework convicted of serious crimes. I am not talking about just entering without documentation. I am talking about serious crimes. The administration is pushing for them to have their sentences commuted so ICE can take custody of them and then remove them from the country more quickly.
The gentleman's bill does the exact opposite. It requires the deportable immigrants be held in our prisons at enormous public expense for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, in some circumstances even for life, making the taxpayers pay for it when they could have simply been removed and deported, which has been the policy of this administration.
The gentleman's bill, which was opposed on a bipartisan basis in committee, is ultimately too punitive, way too expensive, and ultimately ineffective.
I will urge my colleagues to oppose this legislation, with all due respect to my friend.
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Mr. RASKIN. Jayapal), the distinguished ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement of the Committee on the Judiciary.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Washington.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
My friend and the good gentleman from Kansas says that the legislation is about the worst of the worst, and I beg to differ.
The worst of the worst are already covered by existing law. If you commit a murder like the gruesome murder he describes in his State, you can go to jail for life. In many States--and I suppose Kansas, but I don't know--you are subject to the death penalty. If you commit rape or armed robbery, there are laws that cover that.
Today, under section 1326, if you have committed an aggravated felony such as the kind he describes, you already can be imprisoned for an additional 20 years under the immigration statute.
I understand that it might be satisfying for us to say we are just going to increase all these penalties, but we are not in any way connecting with the worst of the worst. What we are really doing is saying that we are going to hold people who have done nothing other than enter the country illegally for much longer periods of time, for 5 years or 10 years.
Again, we see this as very wasteful in terms of public tax dollars. If we set aside the murderers, the rapists, and the armed robbers, who we are going to get under existing laws that make all of that criminal, and you look at what is actually happening here, it is a focus on people who are entering the country illegally.
We have to ask ourselves, is it economically worthwhile for us to say that we are so mad at those people that we want to hold them in our jails for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, or even life in certain circumstances rather than send them back to their own country and toughen the border so they can't get back in? That is precisely the purpose of the legislation that was rejected at the end of 2024 on toughening up the border. We should go back and do that rather than having people continually come back in.
Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Correa).
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from California.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I want to underscore something that the gentleman from California said. The whole weight of this bill is on people who are not the hardened criminals. Obviously, we are going to be prosecuting rapists for rape and murderers for murder and so on. He talked about people who are hardworking immigrants, the kind even President Trump described when for a moment he said there wouldn't be immigration raids on farms because the agricultural sector is in crisis and people are saying we need the workers.
Well, I wanted to echo what President Trump said briefly there before he was corrected by Mr. Miller. I was just in upstate New York in the Adirondacks in the 21st Congressional District represented by Ms. Stefanik. I met a bunch of dairy farmers there, who told me it was impossible for them to find workers to work the farms. With the additional crackdown on migrant labor, it is pretty much impossible for them to get the workers they need.
What is the economic result of that? Well, they take the citizen laborers they have got, and they do mandatory overtime, so they are working an additional 15, 20, 30 hours per week, then they have got to pay them time-and-a-half under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Therefore, the prices go up now because they are not able to find enough workers to satisfy the demand. Their choice at that point is to either pay the farmers less money, which they can't do because the farmers are already at the breaking point, or they have got to increase prices, and that is what they end up doing.
They have said to the grocers, this is because Congress refuses to work on bipartisan immigration reform. That is why we are seeing inflation in dairy, produce, and across the agricultural sector.
The gentleman is telling us if we are serious about dealing with this, we need to do what we started to do at the end of 2024. We need to have bipartisan commitment to immigration reform, and we need to sit down and work this out the way that prior generations of Americans have done. This is a country that has been built on immigration.
I am afraid that the gentleman's legislation here, which is basically just jacking up a whole series of criminal penalties, doesn't get us out of the economic problems and the immigration policy problems that we are in. It is a distraction. It will be ineffectual, and so it is not going to work to deal with the real crises that we are facing.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Kamlager-Dove), a very distinguished member of the Judiciary Committee.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I have no more speakers, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Madam Speaker, I have just one quick correction or amendment to my distinguished friend's last set of remarks, which is that when he says how low a standard must there be, all they have to do is not commit another felony or commit a felony. As I understand the gentleman's legislation--and please correct me if I am wrong, because he certainly knows it better than I do--it is a felony to come back to the country again without having committed any violent crime or any other offense. It becomes a felony under the legislation. Now you have a felony because you have reentered, and at that point you are eligible for up to 20 years or even a life sentence.
Am I understanding that correctly? There are people whose only offense could be reentering without anything else who would be subject to the most serious punishment.
Madam Speaker, I am happy to yield if he can just clarify that.
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Mr. RASKIN. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time. I thank my colleague for that clarification.
Madam Speaker, I am satisfied to believe, again, that there are people who could end up with the most severe penalties under the legislation who have done nothing other than reenter the country, which is something we don't want them to do, which is why we want a bipartisan immigration bill to actually fasten down the border and move forward on this so we are not constantly dealing with this.
The bottom-line problem with my friend's legislation, which is offered in all good faith, is that it is just continuing to pile criminal penalties on people reentering the country without changing any of the incentives or inducements. It doesn't deal with any of the things pushing them out of countries that are marked by violence, gang violence, authoritarianism, and so on, nor is it dealing, as Mr. Correa points out, with the pull of all of the jobs here.
We need real immigration policy breakthroughs and not just piling on a bunch of additional criminal penalties that are not going to work. If they did work, they would just end up costing the American taxpayers hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in holding people in our prisons for offenses that currently they are being held for 6 months or for up to 2 years.
Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the gentleman's legislation.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
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