It’s a different world with a different leader than when the Laken Riley Act was first introduced in the Senate last year. Then, the bill languished in committee without ever seeing a vote. Now, it’s the Senate’s first step under President Donald Trump.
After a 64-35 vote that occurred hours after Trump’s inauguration in the Capitol rotunda, the bill became the first to pass the Senate in the 119th Congress. It showed Republicans fully unified behind the president on unauthorized immigration, his top political priority. And unlike his last term, it showed some Democrats are willing to go along.
Not that the voters gave them much of a choice, Republicans said.
“My Democratic friends know how to read election results as well as you or I do, and I think a number of them have had an epiphany on illegal immigration,” Sen. John Kennedy said.
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Twelve Democrats supported the final passage of the Laken Riley Act, which would mandate detention for unauthorized immigrants arrested for certain crimes and expand the influence of state attorneys general on immigration policy. It will now return to the House to be approved as amended before going to the White House.
Most Democrats opposed the bill, saying they were concerned about due process and the attorneys general provisions. But even as other Democratic supporters swore they weren’t bending on the border, at least one acknowledged there was heavy pressure from the election to go along with Republicans on immigration policy.
“If we can’t pull up with seven votes — if we can’t get at least seven out of 47 — and if we can’t, then that’s a reason why we lost,” Sen. John Fetterman, the most vocal Democratic backer of the bill, said of Democrats during a Jan. 7 Fox News appearance.
Democrats quickly found their seven. Freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, who voted to pass the bill last year as a member of the House, joined the bill as a co-sponsor. Other Democrats, including Sens. Gary Peters, Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, publicly said they would support it.
They even received a vague shout-out during Trump’s Emancipation Hall speech earlier on Monday.
“There is a bill coming up very shortly that we have a lot of Democrat votes, right? It’s going to be a very beautiful bill,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a signing, I would say, within a week or so, I think, and it’s going to be a very good bill.”
Instead of blocking the bill when it came up for a first procedural vote on Jan. 9, 33 Democrats voted to move forward. That included Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who declined to bring it to the floor last year after 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley was killed by an unauthorized immigrant. Many Democrats, including Schumer, said they would back final passage only if the bill was amended.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune held votes on three of the 94 offered. Only one Democrat, Sen. Chris Coons, got a vote on his amendment. It failed. Both offered by Republicans passed in a bipartisan fashion.
It wasn’t the amendment process Democrats hoped for, yet both sides agreed that just holding amendment votes was a positive development.
“At least they allowed two amendments,” Sen. Tim Kaine told NOTUS on Friday. “This is a body where the amendment process has atrophied horribly.”
“So we need to push and make it even more robust,” added Kaine, who opposed the bill in its Friday procedural vote and for final passage.
Democratic senators were not short on reasons to play along with the procedural process. Aside from the recent electoral results, some could be thinking about 2026. Sens. Jon Ossoff, Gary Peters and Jeanne Shaheen are each up for reelection and considered prime Republican targets. Each supported the bill during the votes.
While several Republican senators were hesitantly optimistic the kumbaya would continue, a couple said Democrats’ support for the Laken Riley Act — which twice received bipartisan support in the House — was simply a political cover.
“Oh, it’s political,” Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS. “I can assure you of that.”
“They have to go along with this because they know they can’t do otherwise,” Hawley added. “But I think that you’ll see a snap right back to blind opposition on everything related to immigration.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer had a similar, if more optimistic, take.
“I don’t think there’s a question,” Cramer told NOTUS. “If it is a political thing, good for politics. That’s what we have, a self-governed nation of people that, if we don’t like what they stand for, we get rid of them. And they’ve experienced that this year, I think.”
“What remains to be seen is: How deep is their conviction?” Cramer added. “If they actually snap back to the old, ‘wide open borders, these aren’t real crimes and these aren’t real criminals’ nonsense that lost them the election, they’ll just lose the next election.”
Nevertheless, most Republicans are hopeful — publicly, at least — that bipartisan conversations will continue being productive.
“There’s probably gonna be some games played at some point,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin said of Democratic support on future bills. “But if we can keep it focused on substance, then they should be able to support it.”
Of course, Democratic lawmakers toughening up on immigration, specifically, wasn’t a postelection revelation. The party started a shift in rhetoric around the border and migration problems earlier in the cycle, even trying to leverage immigration against Trump for killing bipartisan border legislation.
It didn’t work. Immigration dragged Democrats down in November, and Senate Republicans expect the bipartisan talks to keep going.
“They saw what the last election was,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville said of his Democratic colleagues. “They got hammered.”
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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