Survivor Advocates Say the Anti-Immigrant Laken Riley Act Is Exploiting Their Cause

The fearmongering bill "fails to reckon with a global culture that tolerates and perpetuates violence against women and girls," one advocate told reporters. "Instead, it puts immigrant survivors at risk."

By Kylie Cheung | January 14, 2025 | 1:14pm

Photos: Getty Images Politics

Survivor Advocates Say the Anti-Immigrant Laken Riley Act Is Exploiting Their Cause

On Monday, Senate Democrats handed Republicans yet another victory for their draconian anti-immigration bill, the Laken Riley Act, with an 82-10 vote to allow the chamber to begin debate and potentially add amendments. Shepherded by lead GOP sponsor Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, the bill would allow immigrants, including those who legally live and work in the U.S., to be indefinitely detained without being charged with a crime—even if they were arrested by mistake, and even if they’re children. The bill, S. 5, would also grant sweeping powers to state attorneys general to ban immigrants from certain countries. This—among the broadest and most dangerous immigration bills in recent history—has been proposed in the name of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed in 2024 by an undocumented immigrant man who had previously been charged with shoplifting.

Riley’s death is a horrific tragedy, but it won’t—can’t—be solved by randomly deporting immigrants for maybe swiping a candy bar. Violence against women is a pervasive, ongoing crisis in the U.S., and the Tahirih Justice Center, an organization that aims to protect immigrant women and girls from gender-based violence, has characterized Riley’s murder as an act of femicide. However, the perpetrators of violent crime in this country are overwhelmingly citizens, and the perpetrators of violence against women are most often male intimate partners and family members.

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In 2021, over a third of female victims of murder and non-negligent manslaughter were killed by an intimate partner. According to the CDC, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner every month. And according to Everytown Research & Policy, two-thirds of intimate partner homicides in the U.S. are committed with a gun, and 75% of intimate partner firearm homicide victims are women. Funnily enough, Congress has yet to address these crises with gun safety legislation. Nor has Congress addressed declining funding for shelters and hotlines for survivors—which comes from the 1984 Victims of Crime Act’s Crime Victims Fund—amid policy changes at the Justice Department; the fund’s budget plummeted from $6.6 billion in 2017 to $1.39 billion in 2023, and thinning resources “may be death” for victims, one advocate told Mother Jones in October.

Meanwhile, this week, ICE reported that the Laken Riley Act would cost around $3.2 billion to enforce.

None of this is lost on survivor advocates, who delivered a sharp message to Congress on Monday evening via a call with reporters. A coalition of organizations including the National Network to End Domestic Violence, the Battered Women’s Justice Project and its Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors, the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors, and other organizations issued a joint statement, which calls “for lawmakers to stop using the problem of violence against women to enact their anti-immigrant agenda.” The coalition called S. 5 “fatally flawed” and demanded that Congress instead “advance true solutions to gender-based violence in the United States.”

Stephanie Love-Patterson, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said the Laken Riley Act is more likely to “put survivors at risk while giving abusers more tools for control.” Immigrants who are experiencing domestic violence, she explained, would be “less likely to seek help from authorities, fearing retaliatory accusations that could lead to detention.” Consequently, the bill would only “embolden abusers” and “represent a step backwards for survivors.” Hannah Shapiro, supervising Attorney at the DV Immigration Project in New York, stressed that the bill “will add real teeth to an abuser’s threat to have a survivor arrested and deported as a tool of power and control.”

The Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors’ Cindene Pezzell further warned the Laken Riley Act’s outsized crackdown on petty crimes would achieve nothing toward preventing tragic deaths like Riley’s, but rather, result in more survivors being jailed. “Criminalized survivors are people who end up charged or convicted of crimes, not just in spite of their experiences of being abused, but oftentimes because of them. Victims who engage in illegal acts, such as theft or other economic crimes, often do so because their abusers literally force them to,” she said. “The more vulnerable a victim is to arrest, the more vulnerable they are to their partner’s ability to leverage court systems against them.”

The Tahirih Justice Center warns that abusers often “force or ‘groom’ victims to commit crimes under duress, and even have them arrested for the abuse they themselves inflict,” and immigrants are especially vulnerable to this. In a fact sheet, the center shares the stories of several criminalized survivors, including three immigrant women from Mexico, Somali, and India who were falsely accused of shoplifting by abusive partners or traffickers; each of the women, two of whom were mothers, were ultimately able to clarify the abusive situations they were in to law enforcement and immigration authorities. But under the Laken Riley Act, the center stressed, these women could face deportation.

Despite being 74 and 80 respectively, top Democrats Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin were both seemingly born yesterday, telling reporters they believe Senate Republicans will work with them in “good faith,” as Durbin put it, to allow “robust debate” and opportunities to “improve” the bill, as Schumer put it. Of course, amendments can’t fix a bill that was written solely to demonize, jail, and deport immigrants.

At least seven Senate Democrats have said they would vote for the bill in its current form: Sens. John Fetterman (Pa.), Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Jon Ossoff (Ga.), Gary Peters (Mich.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.), and Elissa Slotkin (Mich.). Gallego and Fetterman, who won his Senate seat in 2022 after campaigning on his wife’s story of immigrating to the country without documentation, co-sponsored the far-right bill that will be the vehicle through which the incoming Trump administration carries out mass deportations.

Legislation named after victims of “our global culture of misogynistic violence, should address the true problem,” Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center and co-chair of the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors, said. “This legislation fails to reckon with a global culture that tolerates and perpetuates violence against women and girls. Instead, it puts immigrant survivors at risk of prolonged, indefinite detention without bond—which would likely lead to deportation—based merely on allegations of petty offenses made by their abusers.”