A top congressional Democrat is warning that a committee-passed bill meant to expedite the deportation of immigrants who’ve committed certain crimes is so broad that even “high school students who regularly gather to smoke marijuana” could be defined as a “criminal gang” under its provisions.
About four months after the House Judiciary Committee passed the “Expedited Removal of Criminal Aliens Act,” the panel released its report that lays out the majority and minority opinions about the legislation that’s now up for floor action. Rep. Jaime Raskin (D-MD), ranking member of the committee, authored the “dissenting views” section of the report, sounding the alarm about potential enforcement overreach.
“This Administration has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to identify gang members and terrorists. But this bill would give them even more power to do that and strip people of their due process rights,” he said. “And unfortunately, the few guardrails this bill tries to insert are woefully inadequate. The definition of a ‘criminal gang’ in this bill is extremely broad and allows the Administration to label all sorts of people as gang members without requiring much, or even any, evidence at all.”
“For example, the bill states a criminal gang is an
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