Today, the Senate took up the Laken Riley Act. I voted against it.
The bill was introduced in response to the horrific, tragic murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia. Public safety is our most important job and we must take action to fix our broken immigration system. Sadly, this bill wasn’t a serious attempt to do that. It was a political game.
Republicans will try to tell you the bill was about deporting criminals. It’s not. Not only is deporting criminals already legal, it’s already happening. If you come into this country and commit crimes, you will be deported – it’s common sense and federal law.
This bill has no protections for children and minors. Kids who haven’t actually been found guilty of anything would be detained indefinitely and separated from their families. It would lock up kids of all ages, many of whom were brought here as infants and have only known a life in America, and deport them. Are we really going to prioritize detaining kids over violent criminals?
It’s not only cruel, inhumane, and un-American, it’s also ineffective.
The bill would also let any state attorneys general sue the federal government to stop their immigration-related actions.
Whatever your politics, that’s a bad idea. In plain terms: it would cut off the ability of any president to take action on immigration.
Red state AGs would sue a Democratic president over anything they disagreed with, and blue state AGs would in turn sue a Republican president. This would paralyze any future effort from going into effect that could actually secure our borders and improve our immigration system.
We all agree that our immigration system is broken. Clogging things up even more is not going to fix it. And Americans are desperate for us to get to work and actually do something.
It gets worse. The bill would also undermine federal immigration enforcement. To enforce the bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would need an additional 118,500 beds and an enormous increase in staff in detention centers. But there’s no funding in the bill to make this a reality. Again, that’s because this isn’t a serious bill. It’s a political game. In fact, the estimated cost of enforcing the Laken Riley Act would be $83 billion over the next three years.1 And ICE itself has come out and said that the bill is “impossible to execute with existing resources.”2
In short: this would prevent any president, Republican or Democrat, from being able to tackle our immigration system, further strain our federal immigration enforcement agencies, and do absolutely nothing to strengthen border security.
So I voted no.
Let me be clear: If we want to have a serious conversation on immigration, I’m game. That’s why I voted to let the Senate debate the bill. Then I introduced one amendment and joined several other senators to introduce six others.
Yet time and time again, Republicans choose to play partisan politics rather than working on solutions.
They didn’t let any of these amendments come up for a vote.
That’s not surprising. Nearly a year ago, we had a bipartisan immigration deal. One of the most conservative senators in the country, Senator James Lankford, negotiated with Democrats and Republicans to write a bill that would address the crisis at our southern border. We didn’t agree with everything in it, but it was a true compromise that would’ve helped fix the problem.
It would increase the number of border agents to strengthen border security and stop the flow of fentanyl that’s harming our communities. It had work authorizations for new arrivals. It would ensure faster, more reliable processes for those legitimately seeking refuge.
But Senate Republicans voted against it – twice – all because President Trump said so. He tanked our bipartisan immigration deal so he could campaign on the issue rather than see actual progress. He promised a better bill after the election.
The Laken Riley Act is not a better bill. But Senate Democrats saw an opportunity to have a real conversation on real solutions. To work on something that could make it across the finish line and address the issues we were elected to address.
Our amendments would’ve provided comprehensive fixes to the original text of the bill, like protecting children from mandatory detention and providing due process. Our amendments would’ve provided a long overdue pathway to citizenship for DREAMers, supported our farm workforce, and increased funding to disrupt drug trafficking at the border. And our amendment would’ve given standing to state attorney generals when DHS violates constitutional rights, like due process.
Senate Republicans blocked all of them.
We know that comprehensive immigration reform is the only good path forward to actually solving this issue, instead of just using it as something that’s lucrative to campaign on.
https://apnews.com/article/congress-immigration-laken-riley-fd210b5293efe700363d9fab5f82ef06
https://x.com/Ximena_Bustillo/status/1879931476604862819