MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama House on Thursday passed the Laken Riley Act, a bill designed to prevent the release of arrested undocumented immigrants and facilitate their eventual deportation, sparking strong pushback from Democrats over concerns of racial profiling and arbitrary deportations.
Carried by Rep. Ernie Yarbrough, R-Trinity, the Laken Riley Act, or House Bill 7, was named after the 22-year-old Augusta University student who was killed last year by an undocumented immigrant.
The bill would facilitate increased cooperation between local and federal law enforcement for immigration enforcement, as well as require local law enforcement to make efforts to determine the immigration status of arrested individuals. At the federal level, a similar bill also dubbed the Laken Riley Act became law earlier this year, with the measure introduced by Alabama’s U.S. Sen. Katie Britt. The state-level bill is meant to compliment the federal one, Yarbrough says.
“This bill, I think, will be key to the process of securing the safety of our communities,” Yarbrough said when introducing his bill. “It’s got common-sense protections in there and accountability and transparency.”
For close to an hour, House Democrats spoke on the bill, unanimously in opposition. Some, like Rep. Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, said that HB7 would “create a lot of fear” among his Hispanic constituents given the ongoing deportations initiated by President Donald Trump’s administration, some of which have been in defiance of federal court orders.
Others, like Rep. Neil Rafferty, D-Birmingham, argued the bill wouldn’t adequately address the issue it was designed to. Riley was killed by José Ibarra, who illegally immigrated to the United States from Venezuela in 2022. Ibarra had been arrested multiple times before Riley’s murder for crimes such as shoplifting or operating a scooter without a license, but was released in all instances and not held for deportation.
Like the federal legislation, HB7 was designed, its supporters say, to prevent similar incidents by determining the immigration status of an arrested individual and allow law enforcement to hold those suspected of being undocumented immigrants for deportation.
However, even prior to the Laken Riley Act becoming law federally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had full discretion to issue detainers and take custody of arrested undocumented immigrants, regardless of the underlying crime. While ICE is now required to issue detainers for arrested undocumented immigrants, Rafferty argued that Riley’s death was a failure of agency coordination, rather than a lack of laws on the books.
“The bill doesn’t actually address the actual systemic failures between local and federal authorities that actually contributed to this tragedy, and true public safety requires thoughtful, evidence-based approaches, not reactive legislation that creates new problems while failing to solve others.”
While most of the discussion came from Democrats voicing their opposition, several Republicans made a point to speak on behalf of the bill, such as Rep. Ben Robbins, R-Sylacuaga, who highlighted what he considered to be the benefits of expanding efforts to determine the immigration status of arrested individuals.
Yarbrough introduced a substitute to HB7 that in most instances softened its language; provisions mandating reports from jails and the attorney general in some instances were changed to be required on a discretionary basis, and language requiring law enforcement to determine the “nationality” of an arrested person was changed to “immigration status.”
The substitute passed, and though law enforcement would now be required to determine an arrested person’s immigration status rather than their nationality, Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, argued that that provision could still prove to be unconstitutional.
“We can call it what we want, we can say in a bill we’re not looking at your nationality, but the sign post that they look for in determining someone’s immigration status becomes all of those markers that we’re not supposed to use,” England said.
The bill ultimately passed with a vote of 74-26, largely along party lines. On the concern voiced by some Democrats that HB7 could lead to racial profiling, along with arbitrarily extended detentions, Yarbrough told Alabama Daily News that he believed his bill sufficiently addressed those concerns, citing several inclusions.
“The bill prohibits someone from being detained on the basis solely of them being an illegal alien,” he told ADN just outside the House chamber.
“The bill does not allow (law enforcement) to target someone based on their illegal aliens status as far as detaining them. And there’s many provisions in the bill for releasing those people within 48 hours, they can’t be detained indefinitely.”
The bill now heads to the Senate.