Migrants turn themselves in to border patrol officers after crossing into Ruby, Arizona, on 5 January 2025. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Though party leadership called it inhumane, 48 democratic members of Congress voted for the bill to deport immigrants accused, not convicted, of petty theft.
Originally published in The Guardian.
The first act of the 119th Congress of the United States was to pass a bill that would require federal immigration enforcement to detain and potentially deport any unauthorized immigrant accused of minor crimes including petty theft or shoplifting.
The bill, which is to be passed on 20 January, is a meaningful departure from current policy, which requires not one but two or more convictions – not accusations – of crimes of moral turpitude to trigger deportation proceedings. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) estimates that it would cost $29.6bn to implement, requiring an additional 110,000 detention beds and 10,000 detention and removal personnel.
This bill is widely recognized as a step toward Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations under the leadership of border czar Tom Homan, one disparaged by the Democratic party as being inhumane.
Yet, even as Democratic party leadership has decried this mass deportation plan and even as the bill maligns Democrats as victimizing Americans through its policy of “open borders,” 48 Democratic members of Congress voted for this GOP-backed bill. The bill is on the verge of passing in the Senate, as 10 Democrats joined Republicans in clearing the way for its final approval.
As a scholar of borders and immigration, I am not at all surprised by the Democrats’ willingness to participate in the prizing of notions of “security” over human rights. After 9/11, the Homeland Security Act was signed, establishing Ice and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), framing immigration as a security issue, to be solved with security solutions. Since then, $409bn has been spent on enforcement, in the form of removal personnel, detention facilities and all forms of dystopian border technology – increasing steadily regardless of which party is in power, and reaching unprecedented levels this year.
But even as people are deported, even as the south-west border has become the deadliest land route in the world, even as more money has been spent on the southern border than ever before, people continue to arrive in unprecedented numbers. The number of unauthorized people has shifted over time but stayed between 10 and 12 million people for at least the last decade. Continuing to adopt more violent solutions do little more than turn us into an autocracy that imprisons people on accusations, one that is willing to eject them at whatever cost.
Today, an unprecedented one in every 69 people in the world is displaced. For them, crossing into the US is the end of a horrifically long journey – the last steps of an ultramarathon. They are fleeing horrors of a world ravaged by climate disaster, civil war and persecution, much of which the world’s wealthiest nations have had a hand in, through their militaries, industries or colonial pasts and presents.
Yet, looking at these numbers, policy makers have called for more security. The former president Barack Obama built walls that Trump expanded, from which hundreds of people, disproportionately pregnant and older women, have fallen to be maimed and even killed. In his first administration Trump separated children from their families, an idea innovated by Homan, who won an award for his service as head of Ice under the Obama administration. During Joe Biden’s tenure, CBP officers on horseback were filmed violently corralling Haitian immigrants, in imagery that evoked slave patrols.
A security focus is a self-fulfilling prophecy in that if security is not working, you need more security, if it is working you need more security. It creates a nail for which there can only be one hammer. Benchmarks for security have been exceeded and raised again and again, each time with deadlier force, with less attention to human rights or human life.
After 9/11, the Patriot Act vastly expanded the government’s right to conduct mass surveillance. As a result, multiple minority groups’ rights were violated – including Muslim Americans who were subject to registration and unfair deportation, and whose mosques were infiltrated by informants. Later, Black Lives Matter activists movements and social media were monitored through the same policies.
This deportation bill, named after Laken Riley, a nursing student who was killed by an asylum seeker who was accused of shoplifting, is the latest move on the slippery slope towards autocracy promised by this security-focused approach.
Its logic is laid bare by John Fetterman, a Democratic senator who co-sponsored the bill and said it “will ensure detention and deportations of criminal aliens before they can commit heinous crimes like what happened to Laken Riley”. His statement shows the willingness to trample the foundational tenets of human rights – the presumption of innocence, the promise of due process in the name of “security”.
While Fetterman’s words may seem particularly callous or absurd, it is less so when we recognize that our system is designed to repel, deny or kill rather than accept or process people’s legal claims. It is a system that imagines all people coming to our borders as guilty until proven innocent. It is one that has long denied due process.
Our legal pathways have shrunk, with funding on the adjudication of immigrant claims steadily declining in favor of higher and higher expenditure on smart walls that are designed to meet people with violence. The US spends triple the amount on immigrant detention than it does on adjudicating removal and asylum claims. The Biden administration recently enacted a policy that rights groups claim amounts to an “asylum ban” – far from the “open borders” critics allege.
As Trump put it in reference to authorized and unauthorized immigrants he wants to eject, “getting them out will be a bloody story”. If you believe in the sanctity of human life, this alone should be disturbing.
But even if the moral costs do not concern you, then be concerned with the financial costs; the billions we are all paying to fight windmills. There is copious data on the benefits of immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants, to this nation’s economy; copious data on how law abiding they are as compared to citizens.
Detaining and deporting everyone accused of shoplifting is an expensive, stupid idea. The case of one heinous attack does not change that.
It is time to divest from this path to nowhere and invest instead in the long-neglected systems of adjudication of immigrant claims. Given the exorbitant costs of deportation and detention, this approach promises to be not only more humane but also, ultimately less expensive, and safer.
As we enter this second Trump presidency, people are gearing up to fight against policies that dehumanize, to safeguard the rights that do exist. That fight begins with the Democratic party, many of whose members have veered towards autocracy themselves. It is time to call in those who claim to represent us, and demand that they fight for the US to live up to its mantra as a nation of immigrants.
Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center and author of the book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential
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