MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama House advanced two bills Tuesday as part of a larger legislative package targeting illegal immigration, sending one to Gov. Kay Ivey and another to the Senate for concurrence, though much of the package is likely to stall as the 2025 legislative session end draws near.
The two bills that advanced Tuesday were Senate Bill 53 and Senate Bill 63; SB53 would mandate local law enforcement verify arrested individuals’ immigration status and criminalize the transportation of undocumented immigrants into the state, and SB63 would require local law enforcement to collect DNA samples of arrested illegal immigrants.
Rep. Ben Robbins, R-Sylacuaga, carried SB53 in the House, and introduced the bill to his colleagues in the lower chamber.
“It’s very simple, it does two things,” Robbins said on the House floor at the Alabama State House in Montgomery.
“It codifies a practice the jail administrators are already doing now in terms of reporting illegal immigrants detainees and verifying their immigration status, and the second thing it does is it creates the crime of human smuggling, which is knowingly transporting an illegal immigrant for commercial purposes.”
Robbins introduced a substitute to the bill that expanded exemptions for the proposed crime of human smuggling to include health care providers or those operating for religious purposes.
While the substitute was adopted unanimously, a number of Democratic lawmakers spoke out against the measure, including Rep. Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, who argued the proposal to be too broad.
“To me that sounds pretty cruel; (it would impact) a family member (that) is trying to bring a child, say for cancer treatment from Georgia to UAB… I mean this happens all the time that people cross state lines to bring family,” Ensler said.
“It just seems very cruel and overly broad that we’re going to criminalize people doing innocent things. I totally understand going after exploitation, human trafficking, we have federal laws that already deal with that.”
The bill ultimately passed with a vote of 80-18, with five abstentions, sending it to the Senate for concurrence with the changes made in the House. The bill, much like the other around a dozen bills targeting illegal immigration filed this year, were designed to complement and mirror President Donald Trump’s own immigration crackdown effort.
The other bill advanced in the House, SB63, sponsored by Sen. Lance Bell, R-Riverside, would require law enforcement agencies to collect fingerprints and DNA samples from arrested undocumented immigrants, and send those samples to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences. It’s carried in the House by Rep. Mark Shirey, R-Mobile, who said the bill would significantly speed up the process of documenting undocumented immigrants in the state.
“Right now when they detain illegal immigrants, they wait for the feds, the feds come and get them, they do the DNA and the fingerprints, send it to the national lab,” Shirey said. “Their backup is two-and-a-half years; the backup in our state is two-and-a-half hours.”
No member spoke on the bill, and it ultimately passed with a vote of 76-7, with 17 abstentions. With no modifications made to the legislation, it now goes to Ivey’s desk for final approval.
Speaking with reporters after the House had adjourned, House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, R-Rainsville, praised the passage of the two bills, but suggested that it was unlikely that the entire package gets passed into law before lawmakers wrap up for the year.
“We might not get all of those out, but it does look like we made pretty good progress on that,” Ledbetter told ADN.