The House approved a bill on Thursday named for a slain Georgia nursing student that would require Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants accused by local authorities of theft, burglary, larceny or shoplifting.
The bill would also allow states and individuals to sue the Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security secretary if migrants are released on bond or parole and then “harms” the state or residents. It now heads to the Senate, where it is unlikely to pass through the Democratic majority.
Far-right Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., introduced the “Laken Riley Act” after 22-year-old Laken Riley was killed while jogging last month. Police have charged a Venezuelan man, Jose Ibarra, with murder and assault. Ibarra had previously been arrested with his brother for shoplifting around $200 of food and clothing from a Walmart in Athens, Georgia, in October, prosecutors said in a court filing. ICE claims Ibarra was also arrested in August by the New York Police Department on different charges, but the NYPD has said it has no record of an arrest.
“As Joe Biden comes to the Capitol tonight to defend his atrocious record, the House is voting to rebuke him for the open-border policies that led directly to Laken Riley’s murder," Collins said in a speech on the House floor on Thursday. Immigration authorities say Ibarra, 26, unlawfully crossed into the United States in 2022. It is unclear whether he has applied for asylum.
The bill passed in a 251-170 vote, with 37 Democrats crossing party lines to support the bill.
"I now urge the Senate to take up this bill immediately," the Georgia Republican lawmaker wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. "Please help us ensure justice for Laken and give ICE more tools to detain and deport criminal illegal aliens before they commit more serious crimes."
Collins invited Riley’s parents to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Thursday, but they declined to attend.
"I invited Laken Riley’s parents to the State of the Union address, but understandably, they have chosen to stay home as they grieve the loss of their daughter," he wrote on X. Therefore, the seat reserved for my guest will remain vacant to honor Laken and all American victims of illegal alien crime."
“One way or another, we're going to force everybody to take a side here,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Thursday morning. “You saw what happened, you know, committing theft, let out. And then ultimately, the killer of Laken Riley was one of those people who was literally caught breaking laws and then let out of jail right away so that they could go and commit murder.”
Years of data and analyses have concluded that migrants, regardless of their legal status, commit less crimes than natural-born U.S. citizens.
“Immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white,” a Stanford University report from last year found. The right-wing Cato Institute reported in 2020 that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, were less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
But Republicans have seized on the murder as evidence for their false claims that the U.S. is under attack by migrants who are deliberately being let into the country by Biden and other Democrats.
“She was a beautiful young woman. She was a great person, best nursing student there was. I spoke to her parents yesterday. They're incredible people that are devastated beyond belief,” former President Donald Trump said last month in a speech near the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. “The monster that was charged in the death is an illegal alien migrant who was let into our country and released into our communities by crooked Joe Biden”.
Republican politicians and media figures have been calling on Biden to address Riley’s killing directly, but the president has yet to do so publicly. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did not say if he planned to mention Riley in his State of the Union speech.
“This is such a tragic story and, obviously, situation. This is someone's life that was lost, so I do want to always acknowledge and extend our deepest condolences to her family and to her friends and the people who loved her,” Jean-Pierre said. “I would be remiss if I did not continue to say that Republicans rejected a bipartisan proposal that came out of the Senate. And so, if they truly, truly cared about what was going on at the border; if they truly cared about these immigration policies and trying to fix that -- trying to move forward in a step, in a way where we have a tough and fair law -- they would work with us on it.”
A bipartisan border security and immigration reform bill backed by Biden fell apart after Trump’s pushback encouraged congressional Republicans to rescind their support, in part to rob Biden of any credit he would get for attempting to address the humanitarian and political crisis.
The proposed deal would have given Biden the authority to shut down the border if the number of migrant crossings in a given day crossed 8,500, or an average of 5,000 over a seven-day period. It also would have provided $20 billion in funding to facilitate the hiring of an additional 1,500 border patrol personnel, 4,300 asylum officers and 100 immigration judges, as well as allocated funds for 100 machines to help detect fentanyl and around $1.4 billion for cities and municipalities struggling to address their community’s ballooning migrant populations, per the White House.
“Rather than approaching this tragic event in a thoughtful manner, Republicans appear to have just thrown together language from existing unrelated bills that target and scapegoat immigrants to score cheap political points in an election year while doing nothing to address the situation at the border,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said as the bill was being debated on Thursday. He noted the bill would require the detention of migrants who have been accused, not convicted of a crime. “No due process. All so you can demonize immigrants and sound tough without actually making this country safer.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.