The House passed legislation on Thursday that would mandate that migrants who enter the country without authorization and are accused of theft be taken into federal custody, as Republicans pushed a messaging bill to attack President Biden and Democrats as dangerously lax on border enforcement.
The measure was named for Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia who was killed in February. The authorities have charged a Venezuelan migrant who crossed into the United States illegally and was then released on parole in the case.
The bill has little chance of moving forward in the Democratic-led Senate, but Republicans used it as a way to put Democrats on the spot in the debate over the border and sow the kind of fear about immigrants that former President Donald J. Trump has made a staple of his politics.
Their efforts to jam Democrats on the issue appeared to have succeeded, as 37 members of Mr. Biden’s party backed the legislation, which broadly denounced the “open borders” policies of the administration. The bill, which passed 251 to 170, also singled out “‘Border Czar’ Vice President Kamala Harris” and Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, whom the House impeached last month. And it called on Mr. Biden to “publicly denounce his administration’s immigration policies that resulted in the murder of Laken Riley.”
Many Democrats condemned the bill, calling it a craven political maneuver that exploited a tragedy while doing nothing to address the situation at the border. They argued that the legislation would subject more people to mandatory detention at a time when Republicans are refusing to give the Homeland Security Department the resources it needs to carry out its policies. They also noted that the legislation could put innocent people at risk of unlawful detention.
“Let’s think about that,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York. “Someone who is arrested but who is never even charged is now going to be subject to mandatory immigration detention.” He said that people are often arrested for crimes they did not commit. The case of Ms. Riley, he said, was heartbreaking, but “hard cases make bad law.”
Immigration officials currently have broad discretion about whether to detain undocumented immigrants but are required to do in the case of drug crimes, aggravated felonies and membership in a terrorist organization. Even so, space issues mean officials can detain only those who pose the greatest threats to public safety and national security.
On the House floor on Thursday, hours before Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address, Republicans blamed him directly for Ms. Riley’s death. Representative Tom McClintock of California said her killing was “foreordained the day this administration took office.”
Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey stated simply, “Laken Riley is dead because of Joe Biden’s policies.”
Ms. Riley went for an afternoon run near the University of Georgia campus last month and never returned. Her body was later found on a wooded trail, with visible injuries from what the authorities later called “blunt force trauma.”
The man charged with her killing is a migrant from Venezuela, arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally into the country in 2022 and released with temporary permission to stay in the country.
In New York City, Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, was then arrested on charges of driving a scooter without a license and with a child who was not wearing a helmet. In Georgia, he was arrested in connection with a shoplifting case. But when officials ran his name through their databases, there was no indication he should be detained.
Then came the killing of Ms. Riley.
The House bill would call on Mr. Biden to end the practice critics sometimes call “catch and release,” in which migrants caught crossing the border without authorization are given parole to remain in the country until their immigration claims can be adjudicated. It also calls on him to increase immigration enforcement, detain and remove “criminal aliens,” reinstate the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy that requires migrants to stay in Mexico while their immigration claims were processed, and ending what it called Mr. Biden’s “abuse of parole authority.”
The measure also would allow states to sue the federal government for failing to enforce border security laws, which Democrats said was unconstitutional.
“D.H.S. cannot detain everyone, so the executive branch, not the states, have to make choices,” said Representative Glenn F. Ivey, Democrat of Maryland. “This bill would not give D.H.S. the resources to change that. We all know we need more border agents and more judges to eliminate the backlog of immigration cases. This bill is not a serious attempt to address the actual border security needs.”
Mr. Biden has requested almost $14 billion to hire more Border Patrol agents and judges so asylum decisions can be made more quickly. Republicans have rejected that request.
The legislation passed by the House came just weeks after Senate Republicans rejected tough border security restrictions they themselves had demanded, after Mr. Trump stoked opposition to the bipartisan compromise and made it clear that he considers border turmoil a political advantage in the presidential race.
“If Republicans were serious, they wouldn’t have tanked the Senate bill,” Mr. Nadler said. “That bill was going to be agreed to, until President Trump decided that he’d rather have an issue for the campaign than solve the problem.”
The Laken Riley Act is part of a longstanding Republican campaign to stoke fear that lax immigration policies will lead to a surge of immigrants and people of color into otherwise safe communities, fueling crime.
Mr. Trump and other Republicans have sought to distort and wring political advantage from the issue. Speaking about Ms. Riley’s killing, Mr. Trump recently referred to “Biden migrant crime” and said that jails in other countries were “emptying out” into the United States.
On Thursday, Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and the majority leader, said that Ms. Riley’s killing was part of a trend.
“It’s happening over and over again in communities all across America, ever since Joe Biden opened our southern border,” he said.
The statistics do not back up those claims. For years, studies have found that undocumented immigrants have much lower crime rates than citizens born in the United States and legal immigrants across a variety of offenses, including violent crimes, drug crimes and property crimes.
Mr. Trump and Republicans have chosen to highlight the exceptions. During his presidency, Mr. Trump often elevated what he called “angel families,” relatives of people killed by undocumented immigrants, in making the case for his most stringent border policies. Speaker Mike Johnson was planning on Thursday to host angel families in his box in the House chamber for Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address.
Playing on the racially charged politics of crime is hardly a new tactic. Long before Mr. Trump burst onto the political stage warning of criminals coming into the country from Mexico, former President George Bush used the case of Willie Horton, a Black man who committed violent crimes when he was briefly furloughed from prison, to mount a campaign in 1988 against his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis.
Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said the bill that passed Thursday would have done nothing to prevent Ms. Riley’s death.
“This is a nauseating new low for the House Republican majority,” she said.
