01-03-2025
Trump's deportation campaign won't ‘make a dent,' Idaho lawmakers say. They want to help
Idaho lawmakers expressed support Friday for President Trump's mass deportations from the U.S. of immigrants without documentation. They also voiced concern that his policies weren't going far enough.
At the current rate that the administration is conducting deportations, 'we're looking at only 728,000' people deported over the next four years, out of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., said Rep. Jaron Crane, R-Nampa. More than a quarter of foreign-born people — about 14 million — living in the U.S. are undocumented, PBS News reported.
'We're not even going to make a dent,' Crane told a Senate committee Friday.
Ahead of a public hearing for House Bill 83, which would make illegal entry into the state by a noncitizen a state crime that could be enforced by local law enforcement. Crane told lawmakers that Idaho would need to help fill the gap.
'States are going to have to start leaning into this, pressing forward and taking action to help the federal government with this issue,' he said.
Crane's bill is one of multiple pieces of legislation this session that seek to grant local law enforcement more purview over immigration enforcement, which has traditionally been under federal jurisdiction, the Idaho Statesman previously reported. Crane sponsored a similar bill last year, which overwhelmingly passed the Idaho House, but failed in the Senate.
On Friday, Crane and Sen. Todd Lakey, R-Nampa, proposed combining an updated version of Crane's bill with Senate Bill 1039, sponsored by Senate Pro Tem Kelly Anthon, R-Burley. Anthon's bill would make it illegal for a 'dangerous illegal alien' to be present in or smuggled into Idaho, and would disallow their release on probation.
'I saw this particular bill being introduced in the House, and I recognized there was considerable overlap,' Anthon, an attorney, told committee members Friday. 'I thought that it would be better just to work together.'
The proposal would test federal supremacy over immigration matters by deputizing local police and giving local judges authority to issue deportation orders, the Statesman reported. A similar law in Texas, after which the Idaho bill is modeled, has so far not been allowed to take effect by federal judges.
The Idaho bill aims to create new state crimes of illegal entry and reentry, but calls for them to be enforced only if someone is detained on suspicion of first having committed a separate crime.
'This isn't just random out there looking for folks,' said Lakey, also a lawyer.
But James Ruchti, D-Pocatello, a fellow attorney, raised concerns about targeting people merely 'suspected' of a crime, rather than convicted of one.
'It just seems to me that law enforcement could use lots of reasons to detain or investigate for suspected commission of an independent crime,' he told the committee Friday. 'Those words together just are so soft that it creates, maybe, a temptation for a law enforcement individual to profile.'
Geoffrey Heeren, a University of Idaho law professor who specializes in immigration, told the Statesman in January that an earlier version of Crane's bill was likely to prompt costly litigation and had little chance of passing constitutional muster.
Law enforcement agencies in the Treasure Valley cannot enforce immigration laws, but they do work with federal officials, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, if a person detained lacks legal status, according to spokespeople for several area police departments, the Statesman previously reported.
The committee voted Friday to send Crane's bill to the Senate floor to amend it and incorporate portions of Anthon's bill.
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