The House passed a bill on Thursday to mandate deportation and block entry into the United States for immigrants with uncertain status who are convicted of or admit to sex crimes or domestic violence, as a bipartisan majority approved the latest piece of a step-by-step crackdown being imposed by Republicans.
G.O.P. leaders on Capitol Hill have been hammering at the issue of stricter immigration enforcement in the first days of the new Congress as a way to show how they will use their governing trifecta in Washington when President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office on Monday. They are also testing how far they can push Democrats to the right on the issue after their defeats in the 2024 election.
So far, the strategy appears to be working. The bill targeting immigrants convicted of violent crimes against women passed on Thursday by a vote of 274 to 145, with 61 Democrats joining all Republicans in backing the legislation. Last year, 51 Democrats voted to back the bill.
That was the case even though the bill approved on Thursday in many ways duplicates existing law. Immigrants with contested legal status who are found guilty of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence can already be removed under current law, which calls for deportations for those committing “crimes involving moral turpitude.”
The legislation was one of a series of narrow immigration bills that passed the House in the last Congress but died the Democrat-led Senate, including measures to deport migrants accused of minor crimes, require proof of citizenship to vote, and deny funding to cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies.
House Republicans kicked off the year by bringing up a bill to require that immigrants accused of theft be detained and potentially deported, which won bipartisan support. It then headed to the Senate, which appears poised to pass it in the coming days, just as Mr. Trump returns to the White House.
It is not clear how the Trump administration would implement the strict immigration agenda Republicans are putting in place. While the measures are far more limited in scope than the comprehensive border security crackdown Republicans have pledged to pursue, critics have raised concerns about the constitutionality and cost of some of the measures. So far, however, Republicans are deferring such practical challenges until later, as they focus on queuing up bills to deliver on the party’s promise to dramatically reduce illegal immigration.
“Preventing violence against women by illegal aliens is just one of many bills Republicans have proposed that will help close immigration loopholes, reverse the disastrous policies of the Biden-Harris administration and implement President Trump’s enforcement agenda,” Representative Laurel Lee, Republican of Florida, said on the floor.
The legislation would mandate deportation or denial of entry into the United States for any immigrant without legal status or foreign national who is convicted of or admits to committing a sex crime, domestic violence, stalking, child abuse or violating a protection order. It adopts the definition of the domestic violence used by the Violence Against Women Act, which established a grant program to reduce domestic violence by addressing various forms of abuse, not all of them considered criminal.
Proponents of the measure argued that the new legislation, which has a more expansive definition of domestic violence than is in current law, was necessary to ensure that people who might commit such acts are kept out of the country or immediately removed.
“The current definition isn’t broad enough,” Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina and the author of the bill, said on the floor. “A vote against this bill is a vote against deporting illegal aliens who rape and abuse women and children.”
Many Democrats argued that the measure could actually harm immigrants who are victims of domestic crimes. There is no exception for people who fight back in self-defense against their abusers, or have been accused by their abusers of violence themselves, as there is in current statute. Several domestic violence victims advocacy groups have also opposed the legislation on those grounds.
“No exceptions would exist any longer for domestic violence victims who have committed minor crimes in the context of resisting their violent abuse,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said on the floor, adding: “This bill will only make the immigration laws much harsher on the victims of domestic violence, sexual battery and rape, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.”
The measure comes on the heels of another effort to make it easier to detain and deport undocumented immigrants accused of crimes. Last week, the House passed the Laken Riley Act, a bill to require that migrants accused of theft or shoplifting be detained and deported. The bill would also give state attorneys general the right to sue the U.S. attorney general or homeland security secretary if an unauthorized immigrant paroled into the country goes on to harm a state or its residents.
The measure is named after a Georgia nursing student who was killed last year by a migrant who had crossed illegally into the United States and had been arrested for shoplifting, but not detained.
Forty-eight House Democrats joined Republicans in backing that legislation last week. A few days later, the vast majority of Senate Democrats voted to take up an identical bill in the upper chamber.
Late Wednesday, 70 senators — including 21 Democrats — voted in favor of adding “assault of a law enforcement officer” to the list of crimes for which an unauthorized immigrant can be deported if they are accused of it.
If enacted, such changes would pose significant funding challenges, substantially driving up the number of immigrants without legal status who are detained in U.S. government facilities and deported. According to a cost estimate from Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would need to detain up to 800,000 people per year to enforce the Laken Riley measure, which would require a huge investment of beds and detention space — about 118,500 more beds than the federal government currently has at its disposal.
Paying for that space, the additional man power needed to implement the law, and deportation flights could cost Immigration and Customs Enforcement about $26 billion in the first year, and cost the Department of Homeland Security more than $83 billion in the first three years, their estimate said.
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