US Congress Votes To Imprison Immigrants Without Trial
On January 7, 2025, the US House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act (HR 29), which allows people living in the USA to be placed in Homeland Security prison camps then deported without trial or due process of law.
The bill will become official US law when passed by the Senate and signed by Donald Trump. 48 Democrats joined with Donald Trump’s followers in the US Congress to pass the fascist legislation.
HR 29 allows for people who are merely accused, without any criminal charge, of shoplifting, to be imprisoned in Homeland Security detention camps, and then deported, with no right to a trial or other basic due process of law. The law replaces the presumption of innocence in the United States with the presumption of guilt, and paves the way for Donald Trump’s fascist plans to deport or imprison tens of millions of US residents.
HR 29 destroys the Constitution’s right to a fair trial. The legislation will allow for the Department of Homeland Security to put people in prison camps on no basis other than an arrest - even without criminal charge. Not convicted for a crime, not having pled guilty for that crime, there's no grand jury. There's no due process of law involved. They could just kick you out of the United States without any opportunity to defend yourself in court.
What’s especially tragic is that 48 Democrats in the US House of Representatives declared their allegiance to Donald Trump by voting in favor of HR 29. In the very first standalone congressional legislation, these Democratic politicians surrendered to Donald Trump two weeks before his inauguration. The names of the congressional Democrats who voted in favor of giving Donald Trump new fascist powers are:
Brendan Boyle — Pennsylvania
Nikki Budzinski — Illinois
Janelle Bynum — Oregon
Jim Costa — California
Joe Courtney — Connecticut
Angie Craig — Minnesota
Henry Cuellar — Texas
Sharice Davids — Kansas
Don Davis — North Carolina
April McClain-Delaney — Maryland
Chris Deluzio — Pennsylvania
Shomari Figures — Alabama
Laura Gillen — New York
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — Washington
Jared Golden — Maine
Vicente Gonzalez — Texas
Maggie Goodlander — New Hampshire
Adam Gray — California
Josh Harder — California
Jahana Hayes — Connecticut
Steven Horsford — Nevada
Val Hoyle — Oregon
Marcy Kaptur — Ohio
Greg Landsman — Ohio
Susie Lee — Nevada
Mike Levin — California
Stephen F. Lynch — Massachusetts
John Mannion — New York
Lucy McBath — Georgia
Kristen McDonald Rivet — Michigan
Dave Min — California
Joseph Morelle — New York
Jared Moskowitz — Florida
Frank J. Mrvan — Indiana
Chris Pappas — New Hampshire
Josh Riley — New York
Hillary J. Scholten — Michigan
Kim Schrier — Washington
Terri A. Sewell — Alabama
Eric Sorensen — Illinois
Greg Stanton — Arizona
Suhas Subramanyam — Virginia
Tom Suozzi — New York
Emilia Sykes — Ohio
Dina Titus — Nevada
Ritchie Torres — New York
Derek Tran — California
George Whitesides — California
These 48 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives care more about maintaining power for themselves than they care about your fundamental legal rights. They see that Donald Trump is accumulating more power, and instead of having the courage to stand up to Trump, these Democrats are bending the knee. They are submitting to Trump. What's more, they are helping Donald Trump to amass more and more power for himself.
Donald Trump is not yet back in the White House, but his agenda is already moving forward with a new United States Congress. Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the first standalone bill of its current session. And this one is a whopper: H.R. 29.
They call it the Lakan Riley Act, because Lakan Riley is the name of a person who was killed by an immigrant. Being killed by anybody is a terrible thing. Of course, we have lots of murders in the United States that are committed by U.S. citizens. In fact, many, many more murders are committed by U.S. citizens than by immigrants.
Nonetheless, murders by immigrants, murders by people who originally came from countries other than the United States of America, are a special priority for the current government run by Christian nationalists. And that's because Christian nationalists are determined to redefine the United States of America as a new kind of nation, one that is no longer centered around democratic rules and values, but defined by a certain cultural and ethnic identity.
The Bill of Rights in the US Constitution establishes due process of law. All people in the USA, whether they are citizens or not, are supposed to have the right to a fair trial. The Constitution says that people cannot be punished without being convicted by a jury of their peers. Due process of law is the fundamental platform upon which democracy is constructed. Unfortunately, Christian nationalists want to do away with due process of law in order to create a nation that is defined by its ethnic and religious identity instead.
HR 29 is a major step in the process of recreating the USA as a fascist Christian Nationalist nation, because in order to establish their religious and cultural sense of a nation, Christian Nationalists know that they need to get rid of people who don't fit into their nationalist vision first. Donald Trump has described it as having “pure blood” in the United States of America, and has described his eagerness to get rid of the “vermin”. Trump’s vermin are not rats, or cockroaches, or coyotes. They’re human beings who don’t submit to Christian Nationalist demands.
H.R. 29 allows for the fascist transformation of America to begin with a mass deportation of people simply because of their nation of origin, even if they were brought here as infants and have never known another home other than the USA. To enable the mass deportation to begin, Christian Nationalists know that they must dismantle constitutional protections such as the right to a fair trial. That’s what HR 29 is all about.
U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin spoke against passage of HR 29. He explained,
“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 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's lived in United States for decades, say for most of her life, paid taxes and bought a home. But who was mistakenly arrested for shoplifting would not be free to resume her life, but rather would be detained and deported even if the charges are dropped and even if the police admit that the arrest was mistaken. Mandatory detention and deportation from the country just for having been arrested, even if never charged. 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's merely been accused of or arrested for even if not charged for shoplifting, for example, collapses the distinction between actual conviction on serious offenses versus simply being charged with or arrested for something very minor, even if the charges don't even lead anywhere. Like many of the immigration related bills, the GOP is now advancing, This one seems to follow a simple strategy. Pick a crime. Paste into it a template immigration law covering convicted criminals and then require detention or deportation of certain persons merely accused of committing the crime or arrested for committing the crime. No due process required at all. 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.”
Congressman Jerrold Nadler warned yesterday:
“Among other things, this legislation would subject to mandatory detention any undocumented immigrants who are merely charged with committing an act of theft or shoplifting even if they are innocent. This means that someone who's merely accused of shoplifting, someone who might be innocent, who might be the victim of mistaken identity and was not had the opportunity to clear his name would be subject to mandatory detention. This bill is so good that it would lead to the detention of people who have committed no crime and have no intention of harming anyone. That flies in the face of all notions of basic due process and reason. It's both pernicious and absurd. And because this bill is so sweeping, even Dreamers and people living here on temporary protected Status, people may have lived here in this country for decades and shortly after their birth could be subject to the bill's harsh provisions.”
U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal said on the floor of Congress:
“Unfortunately, there are countless real life examples of people getting wrongfully arrested for crimes that they didn't commit. In 2019, a man in New Jersey was arrested for shoplifting and trying to hit a police officer with a car because facial recognition software falsely identified him as the perpetrator. He spent ten days in jail, even though he was actually 30 miles away from where the crime was committed. If he had been a DACA or a TPS recipient and this bill had been enacted, he would be subject to mandatory immigration detention, even though he was innocent of the crime of which he was accused. People deserve to have their day in court and are innocent until proven guilty. That seems to be something that the majority has forgotten or doesn't seem to care about.”