How desperate are Democrats to preserve the “rights” of immigrants who commit crimes? So much so that well over half the House Democratic Caucus voted against a bill that would make it easier to deport immigrants caught driving under the influence and prevent them from re-entry — including illegal immigrants.
According to The Hill, the legislation — HR 6976 — ought to have been a slam dunk. And it did end up passing at the end of the day, 274-150, mostly along party lines.
The roll call of the vote on Thursday shows 215 yeas and zero nays on the GOP side for the bill. (Three Republican members didn’t vote.)
On the Democratic side, 59 voted yea and 150 voted nay, with four not voting.
“In the United States, someone dies in a crash with an impaired driver every 45 minutes,” Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, the Republican who introduced the bill, said in an interview with Fox News. “I lost two of my young newlywed constituents to an illegal immigrant driving under the influence of alcohol.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, said, “With the seriousness of the crime and the potential deadly consequences, you would think that if an illegal immigrant was caught driving under the influence, they would be deported and barred from reentering the country — unfortunately, however, that is not always the case.”
The text of the bill is fairly straightforward, even if the implications aren’t. It amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to make DUI by an alien, legal or illegal, grounds for deportation and future inadmissibility to the United States “without regard to whether the conviction is classified as a misdemeanor or felony under Federal, State, tribal, or local law.”
As The Hill reported, this bill will have the greatest impact on those seeking to change their immigration status and “targets conflicts between state and federal law that sometimes allow past DUI convictions to not be considered in an immigration case.”
However, the bill comes amid a fight between the White House and Congress over the Biden administration’s priorities on immigration enforcement.
Is the border open?
“While the priorities don’t place limitations on deporting those with a DUI, it encourages officers to focus on those deemed a public safety threat,” The Hill said. “It also prioritizes deporting those deemed a national security or border security threat.”
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in the September 2021 guidance.
“We will use our discretion and focus our enforcement resources in a more targeted way,” he added. “Justice and our country’s well-being require it.
“By exercising our discretionary authority in a targeted way, we can focus our efforts on those who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being. We do not lessen our commitment to enforce immigration law to the best of our ability. This is how we use the resources we have in a way that accomplishes our enforcement mission most effectively and justly.”
However, accomplishing that “enforcement mission most effectively and justly” often feels too much like not accomplishing it at all.
Considering the record influx of illegal immigrants to the United States and the absence of deterrence or removal, it’s little wonder that a vote for a bill that would make it easier to deport and keep out aliens who drive drunk seems like yet another Democratic Party stamp of approval on that kind of border policy.
And, indeed, that’s how it was perceived online:
BREAKING: 150 Democrats vote against a bill to deport illegals caught driving while drunk pic.twitter.com/YzyglXfNng
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 1, 2024
Should illegal immigrants be deported if they are caught drunk driving? pic.twitter.com/TRnvKpYCBq
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 1, 2024
This beautiful 6-year-old girl was killed by an illegal immigrant who was drunk driving.
He was deported under President Trump and returned under Joe Biden. https://t.co/D5Ez7Axytb
— Karoline Leavitt (@kleavittnh) February 1, 2024
Now, to be clear, the bill isn’t only about illegal immigrants caught driving drunk; the text makes it clear that it applies to all aliens, which the Cornell Legal Information Institute notes “is a legal term that refers to any person who is not a citizen or a national of the United States, as listed in the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
However, when the nation is in the midst of an acute border crisis and the Democratic Party thinks the only crisis is that the problem doesn’t stay in Texas, it’s difficult to see 150 Democratic members of the House of Representatives voting against legislation that would make it easier to kick drunken-driving illegal aliens out of the country and keep them out of the country, and not see legislators encouraging permanent unlawful migration for the most cynical of purposes.
Perhaps that’s not why these members voted against the bill. Perhaps they felt that legal aliens convicted of a DUI deserved a second chance and didn’t deserve to get caught in the same net that those unlawfully in the United States did. Perhaps they had procedural issues.
The Democrats have a history of aiding and abetting, through the power of the law, illegal immigration on a massive scale — and it’s a history they’re going to try to live down at the polls come this November.
Given that, any representative who voted against this commonsense legislation better have a very good reason why he or she voted against it — or the blood spilled by illegal immigrant drunken drivers will be on their hands, no matter if this bill becomes law or not.
