Richard F. Kosich: Rep. Houlahan shows misplaced priorities by voting against the Laken Riley Act

The Laken Riley Act is the first significant piece of immigration enforcement legislation to be enacted since the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). The new Act, signed by President Trump within ten days of assuming office for his second term, sends a clear and unequivocal message that the lax immigration enforcement under the feckless Biden-Harris administration will no longer be tolerated. Unfortunately, some Democrats still haven’t gotten the memo. 

The Laken Riley Act is named after the 22-year old nursing student who was brutally murdered on a morning jog at the University of Georgia campus on February 22, 2024 by Jose Ibarra, a criminal alien and documented member of Tren de Aragua — the notorious Venezuelan prison gang. 

Ibarra had entered the country illegally in September 2022 and, despite being arrested, was paroled by the prior administration. He then traveled to the sanctuary city of New York, where he was soon arrested again and charged with child endangerment, only to be released before Immigration and Customs Enforcement could detain him. Upon his release, Ibarra migrated to Athens-Clarke County, another sanctuary jurisdiction in Georgia, where he was cited for misdemeanor shoplifting just months before savagely murdering Laken Riley. 

Had the Laken Riley Act been enacted under the infuriatingly comatose Biden-Harris administration, Ibarra wouldn’t have had the opportunity to commit this heinous crime, since it mandates the federal detention of inadmissible aliens who are incarcerated for theft or burglary-related offenses, among other more serious offenses. It also requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary to issue detainers for those aliens to transfer them from local law enforcement into ICE custody before they can reoffend or flee — the latter an all-too-frequent occurrence in “sanctuary cities.”  And, at long last, the Laken Riley Act gives state attorneys general legal standing to sue future federal administrations that release illegal aliens contrary to the law, or fail to detain aliens ordered removed from the country.   

Despite the obvious sensibility of this new legislation in enforcing existing immigration law and protecting the American public, Chrissy Houlahan — a local Democrat representative from Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District — was one of 156 Democrats who voted against this bill on Jan 22, 2025, when it passed both the House and Senate. 

She then penned a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer, published January 25, in which she outlined her reasons for voting against the Act: According to her, the Laken Riley Act is “unconstitutional” because it doesn’t include due process or require a conviction for deportation — only an arrest. She also notes that the Act allows states to sue the federal government “over immigration policies they don’t like,” which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 was unconstitutional. Rep. Houlahan claimed she was therefore “obligated” to vote against this bill since it violates her oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. 

But a careful review of the Act’s actual text dispels Houlahan’s unfounded claim that it’s unconstitutional because of a lack of “due process.” 

The Laken Riley Act, as written, simply adheres to the mandatory detention and removal provisions in The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as codified in Title 8 of the United States Code. For example, Section 1231(a) imposes a categorical detention mandate, which is reinforced by Section 1231(a)(2) requiring the Government “shall detain [an] alien” “[d]uring the removal period,” often beginning either when an “order of removal becomes administratively final” or when an “alien is released from detention or confinement” not arising from the immigration process itself. And, most importantly, Section 1231(a)(1)(A) commands that the Government “shall remove the alien” within the removal period.  

Note the “shall” here; it does not say “may.”

Rep. Houlahan is also being disingenuous when she claims that a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling effectively prevents the Laken Riley Act from allowing states to sue the federal government over “immigration policies they don’t like.” In the case she is referencing (United States v. Texas), it’s clear that border states like Texas weren’t suing the Federal government over a simple policy disagreement, but rather because they suffered the immense concrete, traceable and redressable harm that is typically necessary for Article III standing to challenge the government in court, a government solely responsible for the deliberate but unwarranted release of millions of undocumented migrants into their communities.  

In fact, the Supreme Court didn’t even rule on the merits of the case, or dispute Texas’s assertions of harm, but rather ruled that states lacked standing to pursue litigation challenging the lax immigration enforcement under the Biden administration. As Justice Samuel Alito (the lone dissenting voice in the 8-1 decision) argued, the Court’s “deeply and dangerously flawed” ruling unwisely “renders States already laboring under the effects of massive illegal immigration even more helpless.” He further added: 

“If States are also barred from bringing suit even when they satisfy our established test for Article III standing, they are powerless to defend their vital interests. If a President fails or refuses to enforce the immigration laws, the States must simply bear the consequences.”

The Laken Riley Act was necessary because although the IIRIRA already made serious crimes deportable offenses for a convicted illegal alien, the prior Secretary of Homeland Security, the laughably impotent Alejandro Mayorkas, issued a DHS memorandum that not only permitted deviations from IIRIRA’s statutory mandates, but flatly contradicted those mandates by stating that qualifying convictions alone were insufficient grounds for initiating arrest, detention, and removal proceedings. Mayorkas simply had instructed his agents to disobey the IIRIRA and instead follow a different policy that was more to his liking — i.e. non-enforcement and overt capitulation to the open borders cabal.  

In response to Mayorkas’s circumvention of previously established legislation, the Laken Riley Act simply reaffirms existing immigration law, such as 8 U.S.C. §1226(c) that directs the Government to “take into custody any alien”…“when the alien is released” from criminal State custody, including when released on “parole, supervised release, or probation” — regardless of a conviction. At that point, a “cooperative” State is supposed to notify DHS so that it can be ready to assume its obligation under sections 1226(a) and (c) to take the alien into federal custody, something that wasn’t happening in many sanctuary cities under the prior administration and continues even today.

The Biden administration’s unwillingness to enforce existing immigration laws only exacerbated the issue of criminal illegal aliens roaming freely across the country. Rep. Houlahan, other open-borders Democrats, and immigrant rights groups opposing the Laken Riley Act are either woefully ignorant of that fact, or tacitly endorse the ramifications of such a blatant and egregious disregard for established federal immigration law put into place nearly three decades ago to protect the American public.

Allyson and John Phillips, Laken’s mother and stepfather, voiced support for the Act after it passed the US House:

“The Laken Riley Act has our full support because it would help save innocent lives and prevent more families from going through the kind of heartbreak we’ve experienced… [E]very single member of Congress should be able to get behind this purely commonsense bill that will make our country and communities safer.”

Thanks to the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia), the government will no longer prioritize leniency for criminals over the safety of its own citizens. Tragedies like the murder of Laken Riley, Kate Steinle, Sarah Root, and Jocelyn Nungaray now can be prevented by simply enforcing existing immigration law. 

Unfortunately, the signing comes too late to save Laken Riley, but many other Americans can sleep better at night knowing we finally have a commander in chief in charge who actually cares and will do everything within his power under the Laken Riley Act to protect innocent victims from the next Jose Ibarra. For that we should all be grateful, even Rep. Houlahan.  

Richard F. Kosich is a Grassroots Manager at AFP Action PA, writer and community activist. He’s also a Republican Committeeman for Conshohocken Ward 2, Chair of the Conshohocken Borough Republican Committee (CBRC) and Vice-Chair of Montgomery County Republican Committee (MCRC) Area 6.