Congress appears likely to pass the Laken Riley Act this month. The legislation is branded as targeting noncitizen criminals like the man who murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley last year. Unfortunately, the legislation misses the target.
The federal government’s immigration enforcement system already prioritizes the detention and removal of serious criminals. Unfortunately, President-elect Trump will rescind those policies, letting officers arrest anyone here illegally regardless of whether they threaten Americans. The LRA could be a perfect opportunity for Congress to bind Trump’s hands and force him to prioritize criminals.
But the LRA is a sloppy bill. The LRA’s first section requires the detention of any noncitizen without status charged with or arrested for shoplifting or another theft offense.
Anyone convicted of those offenses is already subject to mandatory detention. But an arrest isn’t a conviction, and the LRA would require the federal government to take custody of people the police have cleared.
Even if charges were pending, requiring the federal government to take custody of people charged in state courts means they would not be guaranteed their day in state court. That might be appropriate in cases where the person has demonstrated a refusal to appear in court. Still, it’s overreach to mandate it, which deprives the accused of the opportunity to defend themselves and the states the chance to obtain restitution.
Even if they’re guilty, the bill still doesn’t make sense: it mandates the arrest of accused shoplifters over every other criminal in America. Agents are sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Why would Congress tell the administration that it must drop everything and “expeditiously take custody” of every misdemeanor shoplifter if they are tracking down violent offenders?
If you’re confused about why the LRA is all about shoplifters, not murderers, it’s because Riley’s killer was accused of shoplifting in Georgia. The assumption is that if LRA were in effect, he’d have been detained. But this is wrong, too. Georgia police never brought him to jail, so the federal government never would have had the chance to pick him up. The premise of the bill is wrong.
But this sloppy provision is not the LRA’s purpose. The primary goal is to empower states to control US immigration policies by overturning Supreme Court precedent that denies states the ability to sue over immigration enforcement decisions, specifically allowing lawsuits over:
- failure to detain every subject of mandatory detention
- grants of parole (or humanitarian entries), and
- visa issuances to nationals of countries that “unreasonably delay” accepting deportations.
So many people are already subject to mandatory detention that the federal government could not possibly ever detain them all. This includes most asylum seekers (about 1 million), recent border crossers (3 million last year), and anyone ordered removed (1.4 million).
Congress loves mandates, but it hates paying for them. The total immigration detention capacity is 40,000, and the entire federal prison population is only about 150,000. This means that any state AG could sue to force the federal government to arrest any person in any of these groups. Another state AG could then sue to get them to arrest another group, forcing them to release another group.
This insanity aside, allowing states to override federal enforcement priorities guarantees that the federal government will have to release or fail to arrest serious criminals to make way for peaceful people targeted by states with aggressive attorneys general. Texas even sued in 2023 to stop legal entries by vetted lawful immigrants granted “parole” (a temporary status) to fly into the United States.
Texas lost because the court said the legal migration program reduced illegal entries, so the net cost to Texas fell. But the LRA specifically says that any cost of more than $100 is enough, even if the policy’s net cost is saving the state money.
Even more dramatically, LRA-authorized lawsuits could force the federal government to shut down all kinds of legal immigration and lawful travel from places deemed to be unreasonably delaying deportations. China, Cuba, Venezuela, and India are currently deemed to do this (some because of policy, some because of inefficient bureaucracy necessary to identify if someone is their citizen).
This would affect hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants and travelers to the United States, including spouses and children of US citizens and critical employees of US businesses. It would create international conflicts and could affect Americans’ rights to travel to those countries. The turmoil that this provision would cause for legal immigration is reason enough to question what this bill is really about.
What happened to Laken Riley is a tragedy, and Congress should thoughtfully focus on identifying and removing criminal threats. But the bill that bears her name—against her family’s wishes—is not thoughtful. It is sloppy, and it would make Americans less safe, less prosperous, and less free.
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.