Civil rights groups warn Laken Riley bill could open the door to Trump’s mass deportations

Immigration attorneys and civil rights groups warn that the first immigration bill of the new Congress is opening the door to Donald Trump’s planned “mass deportation operation” — his pledge to invoke a national emergency, deploy military assets and send state and local law enforcement into immigrant communities across the country within his first days in office.

The Senate voted 84-9 on Thursday to begin debate on the Laken Riley Act, with only nine Democratic senators voting against it and five not voting at all. The House passed the bill by a vote of 264-159 on Tuesday, with 48 Democrats voting for it.

Republicans, led by Trump, have consistently hammered Democrats on the US-Mexico border, often using dehumanizing language that the United States was being “invaded.” The bill was named after Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student killed by Jose Ibarra, who was in the country illegally from Venezuela.

In a letter to Congress, the ACLU called the legislation a “slippery slope” to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda that exploits Riley’s death “to escalate a consistently xenophobic and false narrative about immigrants.”

“It is also a serious threat to civil liberties that would inflict damage on an already taxed immigration system, invite racial profiling of longtime residents, and violate bedrock constitutional principles,” the letter said.

Kerri Talbot, executive director of immigration policy organization Immigration Hub, told reporters on Thursday she was “shocked” how quickly lawmakers were advancing a “dangerous and unconstitutional” bill.

As written, the bill would require federal authorities to detain people who have not been convicted or even charged with minor crimes like shoplifting, “potentially sweeping thousands of people into mandatory detention at enormous taxpayer expense and diverting law enforcement resources,” according to the ACLU.

Immigrants who are arrested without being convicted could be subject to indefinite detention and deportation for petty offenses, including those that are often dismissed, according to Immigration Hub, which labeled the measure a “backdoor to mass detention.”

State attorneys general would be allowed to sue the federal government over immigration enforcement issues. That includes bans on visas from entire nations — what the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick called “the most internationally significant” part of the bill.

The bill will “open the floodgates to bad-faith lawsuits … brought by hostile anti-immigrant politicians,” ACLU senior border policy counsel Sarah Mehta told reporters, noting it will line the pockets “of the private prison industry” preparing for Trump’s mass deportation and incarceration plans.

She called the legislation an “alarming threat to due process.”

The bill would also “hamstring” federal immigration authorities by forcing agents to shift resources towards arrests and detention for minor crimes while there is a shortage of facilities and beds, according to former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief of staff Jason Houser.

Agencies would be forced to move from determining how to “humanely” deter illegal immigration towards “driving to … pick someone up for petty theft at a CVS in the most rural part of Texas,” he told reporters.

“People want sensible solutions. They want something done. They want order. They don’t want chaos,” Talbot said.

This legislation “does the exact opposite,” she said.

Several Democratic senators are supporting the legislation outright, while a handful of other Democrats agreed to bring the bill to a vote in order to introduce amendments that can scale back some of its far-reaching measures.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the bill “a gross violation of civil rights.”

“When we start rounding people up just based on an accusation of a crime, remove people’s day in court, eliminate the basic constitutional rights that we are all important in this country, that’s the beginning of the end when it comes to the erosion of our civil liberties in America,” she said Thursday.

“What I want people to understand is that immigration has always been the Trojan Horse by which our rights, our surveillance, our civil liberties of everybody in this country begins to erode,” she said.

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia told The Independent that he’s “concerned” that the bill empowers state attorneys general to enforce immigration law and targets immigrants with arrest records rather than convictions, with a potentially “sizable” cost to taxpayers.

“There’s a cost to this bill, but because it’s not been through a committee, nobody knows what it is, but I think it’s going to be sizable,” he told The Independent. “I think it’s an important topic, and we ought to be debating it, but I have a lot of concerns, and I hope that we may be able to address some of them.”

Eric Garcia reports from Washington D.C.