Press Releases

WASHINGTON, DC (January 7, 2025) - Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, spoke on the House floor in opposition to H.R. 29, the Laken Riley Act, a bill that exploits Laken Riley’s tragic death and does nothing to fix our broken immigration system and instead requires the Attorney General to detain people wrongly accused of petty crimes like shoplifting.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, on the House floor today, and the video of his speech: 

Ranking Member Raskin
H.R. 29, the Laken Riley Act
Tuesday, January 7, 2025

The Biden Administration brought us back from a devastating pandemic and economic crisis under Donald Trump by investing in American workers, American manufacturing, and American infrastructure. Our policies for the vast working-class majority instead of the tiny rapacious billionaire class pulled our economy back from the brink. Today, our nation’s economic strength is the “envy of the world,” as the Economist Magazine put it, with an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, wages rising across America and the Gross Domestic Product growing at a robust 3.1 percent. Moreover, the murder rate is way down, unlawful immigration at the Southern Border is now below where it was when Trump left office four years ago, and the roaring stock market—which is what Trump and his billionaire entourage of course care about most—just completed its strongest two years in a quarter-century. Now is the time to make sure all Americans enjoy the benefits of this stunning economic growth—we should be coming together today to increase the minimum wage, lift children out of poverty, and strengthen unions, Social Security, Medicare, and the middle class. But Donald Trump is instead assembling a billionaire Cabinet from the top .000003% of the wealthiest Americans, drawing the top tier of his administration from poolside cocktail hour at Mar a Lago and setting up the bro-ligarchs and plutocrats to plunder an even larger share of government contracts and public resources. Trump campaigned on the seductive promise of bringing down the high post-COVID 19 prices for rent, groceries, consumer goods and healthcare. But now he’s giving power over the economy to his team of globetrotting dictator-dealing CEOs and billionaires—the very people responsible for exploiting the pandemic to increase prices in the first place.
 
I doubt the billionaire oligarchs have any interest in bringing down the cost of living for the working middle class, but if they do, Democrats of course stand ready to work with them. After all, we’re the ones who dramatically lowered prescription drug prices in Medicare, capping out-of-pocket monthly expenses at $35 and annual total out-of-pocket expenditures at $2,000. The MAGA Republicans, deep in the pocket of Big Pharma, categorically opposed us on all of that legislation. But if they have good policy proposals for continuing to lower inflation, which is what they campaigned on, then by all means bring them forward.
 
Democrats have repeatedly crossed the aisle to hammer out bipartisan compromise. Last year President Biden and Senate Democrats worked with the ultra-conservative Senator, James Lankford, to arrive at a tough bipartisan border security deal. But President-elect Trump tanked the deal—openly preferring to yak about a border crisis than to develop a border solution.
 
Today, the Republicans are on the floor, not with their long awaited but entirely missing policy solutions to the problems of inflation or our immigration system. Instead, today’s bill is an empty and opportunistic measure. It’s not—like the compromise they tanked in the last Congress—a bill for greater border security or better technology in the ports of entry, or for expanding lawful pathways to immigration and citizenship for millions of people, or for addressing huge immigrant visa backlogs.
 
No, this bill would upend 28 years of mandatory immigration detention policy by requiring that any undocumented immigrant arrested for theft, larceny, or shoplifting be detained, even if they are never convicted or even charged with a crime. This is a radical departure from current law, which since 1996, has generally required mandatory detention only for those persons who are criminally convicted or who admit to having committed certain serious crimes—that is, when criminal guilt is certain and established beyond a reasonable doubt. 
 
Under this bill, a person who has lived in the United States for decades and most of her life, paid taxes, and bought a home but who is mistakenly arrested for shoplifting would not be freed to resume her life—she would be detained and later deported even if charges are dropped and even if the police admit that the arrest was mistaken. 
 
Consider a young Dreamer or TPS recipient who is at the mall with a group of friends after school. A friend in the groups shoplifts, stealing a candy bar. To scare the whole group straight, everyone is arrested but no one is charged. For most of the kids, it’s a humiliating afternoon and a valuable lesson. But for one of them, a young person who has been in America lawfully for years with his or her family, the consequences would be devastating—mandatory detention and deportation just for being arrested, even if never charged.  
 
It seems strange that our friends across the aisle are taking this position when they do not even believe that the criminal justice system can be trusted when a jury unanimously convicts someone who has had the best legal representation money can buy in New York City on 34 different felony criminal counts after an extended criminal trial with all due process protections and rights afforded.
 
If the criminal justice process cannot be trusted to identify a truly guilty person even when that person has been arrested, charged, indicted, prosecuted, represented at every stage, given an opportunity to cross-examine all witnesses and to testify personally, and then is unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers beyond a reasonable doubt, then how can the criminal justice process be trusted to identify a truly guilty person just with an arrest and no indictment, no prosecution, no cross examination, no neutral adjudication by an impartial judge, no fact-finding and no criminal conviction by a 12-person jury beyond a reasonable doubt?
 
Mandatory detention has always been reserved for people who are convicted of crimes and actually commit crimes. Expanding the detention requirement to include every person who has merely been accused of—or arrested for but then not even charged with—shoplifting collapses the distinction between actual conviction on serious offenses versus simply being charged with, or arrested for and never charged with, something very minor. 
 
Congress has never even appropriated sufficient resources to detain all noncitizens who fall under even the currently serious “mandatory detention” categories. Even President Trump, during his first term, never tried to detain all migrants theoretically subject to mandatory detention. So this extremely elastic provision adds nothing to the equation other than more empty rhetoric and greater bureaucratic bloat.
 
This bill also seeks to give state governments authority and control over the federal immigration system by trespassing on the Article II executive power in a way that eight out of nine justices on the Supreme Court completely repudiated two years ago as a blatant violation of the separation of powers. The bill seeks to give State Attorneys General precisely what the Supreme Court has denied: legal standing to sue the federal government in court for perceived violations of certain sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act so states can block federal immigration policies, capsizing the Supremacy Clause and expanding judicial power to encroach upon executive discretion under Article II.
 
In June 2023, the Supreme Court, in United States v Texas, emphatically rejected the alleged standing of states to sue the federal government to alter its immigration arrest policies. This bill attempts a legislative bypass of the constitutional decision in United States v Texas, written by Justice Kavanaugh and joined by eight of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. 
 
In rejecting the states’ standing argument, the Court noted, among other things, that lawsuits alleging insufficient arrests or prosecution run against the Executive Branch’s exclusive Article II authority to enforce the law, which includes the discretion to determine enforcement priorities in the face of a chronic lack of resources and shifting public safety, public welfare and foreign policy needs and priorities. 
 
If this bill were to become law, both provisions would have the perverse effect of undermining the federal government’s efforts to prioritize the detention and deportation of the most dangerous convicted felons. With the vastly expanded new statutory scope and new authority for states to get legal standing on steroids, the government can be sued by a state for not detaining everyone charged with, or even arrested for, the pettiest of crimes like shoplifting.
 
Yet this bill tries to give States standing to sue for harms as small as $100, dramatically shifting power from the Executive branch to the courts and the federal government to the states, both in ways considered completely dubious by the Supreme Court.
 
Like many of the immigration-related bills the GOP is advancing, this one follows a simple strategy. Pick a crime, paste it into a template immigration law covering convicted criminals, and then require detention or deportation of certain persons merely accused of committing the crime—no due process required. This allows us to get up and demonize immigrants without doing anything to fix the immigration system, and to act tough without actually making America safer or solving any of the problems within the immigration laws. We should work together on comprehensive and meaningful reform.
 
My colleague from California invites us to believe that the only crimes committed by undocumented aliens are those who entered during the Biden Administration. Well, in fact, if you look at it, hundreds of thousands, 500,000 crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the first Trump Administration. And over 1.1 million people who crossed during the first four years of his Administration were eventually released from custody. One of the people released from custody, an undocumented alien is charged with murdering 19-year-old Adam Luker, from Alabama.
 
Why don't we have a bill named after Adam Luker? Is it because of the inconvenient fact that the undocumented alien who killed him came in under Donald Trump? I would hate to think so. But we can find lots of cases like that.
 
That’s not what we should be doing here in Congress. We should be seriously confronting the problems in a serious way together. Rather than just trying to make partisan hay out of other people's tragedies in their lives.
 
Mr. Speaker, this legislation does not move the ball forward on any of the problems facing America. And they are being moved under closed rules without a hearing, without any legislative scrutiny. This means that no Member—not only just Democrats but Republicans too—no Member can offer any amendments to repair the gaping flaws and gaps in these slapdash political bills. I would urge our colleagues to take a much more serious approach here.
 
The murder of Laken Riley was an unspeakable and appalling crime, a heinous act. And no parent, no family should ever have to bear such a calamity. We must take clear steps to make sure that people who commit crimes like this are punished to the full extent of the law. And I trust that my friends agree that those who commit horrific violent crimes like these must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
 
But this bill fails to take any meaningful action to improve our broken immigration system and to prevent crimes like this from occurring again, whether the undocumented aliens entered under a Democratic administration as they have, or Republican administration as they have. We are asked to vote on a bill that fails to address any of the real issues at stake and we are foreclosed from offering any amendments to improve this sloppy and political product.
 
I urge all my colleagues to oppose this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.
 
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