What Is the Laken Riley Act?

The first piece of legislation the new Republican-led Congress is sending to President Trump’s desk zeros in on a major priority of his second term: immigration.

The Laken Riley Act, as the bill is known, directs the authorities to deport immigrants who are accused — not yet convicted — of specific crimes, if they are in the country illegally.

The bill’s passage came as Mr. Trump began his promised crackdown on the border with executive orders, presidential memorandums and policy directives to limit the flow of migrants into the country. Republicans have promised that more measures to accelerate and expand immigration enforcement will follow.

Democrats raised many concerns about the bill, saying it would unfairly target immigrants whose only crime had been entering the country without authorization. But a number of them backed it anyway — a sign of how Democrats are eager to regain ground with voters concerned about illegal immigration.

Here’s what to know about the bill, soon expected to become law.

Some crimes could lead to deportation for immigrants who are in the country illegally.

The measure lists specific crimes that could cause a person without authorization to be in the United States to be detained and deported. They include burglary, larceny, theft, shoplifting, assaulting a police officer and any crime that results in death or bodily injury. The bill mandates detention for people who are arrested, charged or admit to committing such a crime, without requiring that they first be convicted.

It also gives state attorneys general the right to sue the U.S. attorney general or the secretary of homeland security if an immigrant with uncertain or contested legal status who is paroled into the country commits a crime that harms either the state or one of its residents physically or financially, if the value of the harm is more than $100.

The murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student from Georgia, inspired the law.

Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University in Georgia, was jogging one morning in February 2024 when she was attacked and killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old from Venezuela who had entered the United States in 2022 without authorization. Like many others, he was given temporary permission to stay in the country. Mr. Ibarra was sentenced to life in prison for the crime.

Before Mr. Ibarra killed Ms. Riley, he had been arrested in connection with a shoplifting case but was never detained. The legislation aims to spur the removal of unauthorized immigrants accused of such crimes before they can go on to commit more serious ones. Still, for the past 150 years, immigrants overall have been less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States, a 2023 study concluded.

Critics argue that bystanders could easily be caught up by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Because the measure only requires that a person be accused or charged in order to be deported, it is possible, critics have argued, that bystanders to a crime could be hurt by it. During congressional floor debates, Democrats argued that if a group of people were in a store and one chose to shoplift, the police might easily arrest all of them before being able to sort out the facts of what transpired. Anyone in that group unauthorized to be in the country could then be subject to deportation, even if the authorities ultimately determined they had committed no crime.

Several Democrats voted for the bill, despite expressing reservations about its scope and cost.

Democrats raised many concerns with the bill. They argued that it did not have strong enough safeguards to protect people who entered the country illegally but have since obtained permission to stay temporarily — such as those who have been able to defer removal because they were brought to the United States as children, or people whose home countries make them eligible for temporary protected status. Democrats have also argued that the part of the measure that allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government could be unconstitutional — a claim Republicans reject.

But since the 2024 election, in which Republicans kept the House and gained the Senate and presidency amid promises of an immigration and border crackdown, Democrats have been under tremendous pressure to shift to the right on immigration matters.