Free Idea: What If Senate Democrats DIDN'T Vote For The Fascist Anti-Immigrant Bloody Shirt Bill?
Oh, we're helping Trump deport people for more minor offenses now, to avoid being 'soft' on immigration?
Before Donald Trump is even sworn in, quite a few Democrats in the House and Senate have signed on to help pass a Republican immigration crackdown that could lead to deportations of undocumented immigrants for minor crimes like shoplifting. We started writing this article by being mad at Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) the lone Democrat to actually cosponsor Republicans’ “Laken Riley Act,” a bloody-shirt waving bill designed to exploit popular anger over the vicious February 2024 murder of a college student by an undocumented immigrant. But the problem goes well beyond Fetterman.
Republicans cynically made use of Riley’s death to whip up fear, making it their justification for their wet dream of mass deportations. And now they have power. But that’s no reason for Democrats to go along with it.
Unfortunately, it just might work, ignoring the fact that immigrants, even undocumented immigrants, are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. America is in a punitive mood, Democrats lost the White House in part because of fear of immigrants, and if that means more heavy-handed laws that won’t actually solve anything, plenty of “moderate” Democrats are all in. It’s simply the convenient thing to do.
The act won’t only punish murderers like Jose Ibarra, the man who was convicted of killing Riley while she was jogging at the University of Georgia. Ibarra entered the US illegally, and was released after shoplifting items from a Walmart. Because all shoplifters become brutal killers, the law will require federal detention of anyone without papers who’s arrested — not convicted or even charged — of crimes related to theft, including “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” Under current immigration law, the bar for deportation is committing two petty crimes, but this law would allow deportation after a single arrest for a minor offense.
Let’s say that again: no conviction necessary, not even charges being filed.
As Ben D’Avanzo of the National Immigration Law Center points out, this change could have drastic effects:
Under this bill, if an undocumented mom is grocery shopping with her young child who grabs a banana on the way out without her noticing, she could be arrested, detained without bail, and deported.
Again, we just want to point out that senseless murders are horrible and we should do what we can to prevent them, but exploiting Laken Riley’s death by deporting people for minor offenses won’t fix immigration, and it won’t reduce crime. But if you say that, obviously you’re OK with murder, which helps explains why 48 House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act earlier this week.
But the bill is even worse than just that, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, explains at MSNBC. The bill wouldn’t just force detention and likely deportation of individuals; it includes a far larger change to immigration law that would effectively give states the chance to overturn federal immigration policy, in violation of the Supreme Court’s many decisions giving the federal government sole authority in making immigration policy and decisions over individual immigrants' cases. Reichlin-Melnick explains:
But the Laken Riley Act creates five areas where state attorneys general would be authorized to go in front of a federal judge and seek court orders forcing the executive branch to carry out certain enforcement actions. On one end of the spectrum, the bill could give state attorneys general power to overturn garden-variety decisions made by individual immigration officers every day as to whether a person taken into immigration custody should be released from detention, granted humanitarian parole or put on a deportation flight.
On the other end of the spectrum, the law would allow state attorneys general to force a secretary of state to invoke a Cold War-era law that authorizes the U.S. government to issue sweeping visa bans to countries that do not accept the deportation of their own nationals, even if the secretary had chosen not to invoke that authority.
For example, since China generally resists deportations of its nationals, Texas AG Ken Paxton would be able to go to federal court if a Chinese citizen on an H1-B work visa committed a crime, got a deportation order, and China refused to take the person back. In court, Paxton could try to “force the federal government to ban all visas from China (or maybe just all H-1B visas) without having to worry about taking the blame for the economic or diplomatic fallout to the United States.”
India is another such “recalcitrant” country that might be subject to such a move. Federal governments under both parties have avoided invoking blanket visa bans against either India or China over their refusals to accept deportees, for obvious reasons, what with more than 1.8 million visas — not just for immigration, but for tourists, international students, business visitors, and the like. But a single state AG with a bug up their ass (or an upcoming reelection campaign) could overturn all of that.
It’s a recipe for even more chaos, going far beyond just the deportation of undocumented people who steal things. It’s certainly unconstitutional under all Supreme Court decisions upholding federal supremacy, now, although Crom knows that’s no longer a predictor of how this particular Court might rule.
Politico reports that so far, nine Democrats have said they’ll vote to advance the bill to debate Friday, although not all have said they’ll actually vote for it as written — not that Republicans are likely to let any amendments pass. In addition to those nine, other Democrats have been noncommittal, so every last Democrat in the Senate needs to hear from their voters.
The Democrats who especially need to hear from their constituents are:
Mark Kelly (Arizona)
Ruben Gallego (Arizona)
John Hickenlooper (Colorado)
John Ossoff (Georgia)
Tammy Duckworth (Illinois)
Angus King (Maine)
Gary Peters (Michigan)
Jacky Rosen (Nevada)
John Fetterman (Pennsylvania)
Politico adds that some of the Dems on this list — Hickenlooper, Ossoff, and Duckworth —only planned to vote to open debate, but haven’t committed to voting for it without amendments, so a filibuster on ending debate and going to a final vote is still possible.
Get to the phones, folks, and let your Democratic senators know you oppose this very bad bill. (Hell, let your Republican senators’ offices know you’re against it, too — they do keep track of calls.)
Trump isn’t in office yet, but the new Congress is. It’s time to get your Congress-calling muscles limbered up again. We’re all going to have to do this a LOT for the next few years.
[Philadelphia Inquirer / Politico / MSNBC]
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I'm still watching the Carter memorial and thinking about he he did what he felt was right and moral, regardless of the political price. Senators on BOTH sides of the aisle know that "immigrant crime" is a convenient whip-up-the-masses tool and an insignificant problem compared to the many others crushing the populace right now, but they all lack the moral courage to push back. It's really disheartening, this lack of character.
Why do you lot even bother having a Federal government if the individual states can do whatever the fuck they like, even in the face of a constitution that says they can't?