1 Vote That Could Come Back To Haunt Democrats In 2028

WASHINGTON — Three Democratic senators with potential ambitions to run for president in 2028 say they are standing by their decision to vote for a law giving President Donald Trump enhanced powers to detain undocumented immigrants, even as others in the party have begun apologizing for their support of the measure. 

Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) all told HuffPost they stood by their decision to vote for the Laken Riley Act early in 2025. The GOP-authored law, which attracted substantial Democratic support at the time, allowed Trump to dramatically expand the number of undocumented people subject to mandatory detention, which critics say effectively set the stage for his administration’s widely criticized nationwide raids on immigrants this year. 

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“It should have been clear to every Democratic lawmaker that voting for this bill was going to have consequences,” said Will Dempster, a former U.S. Senate staffer and spokesperson for the National Immigration Law Center’s advocacy arm, the Immigrant Justice Fund. “It was really the first indicator that we had that Trump was going to pursue an authoritarian agenda on the backs of immigrants. It was foreseeable. And I think it does, you know, call into question their judgment on this important issue.”

While the senators are standing by their support for the law, a host of other Democrats are backing away from it. Rep. April McClain Delaney (Md.), Rep. Jahana Hayes (Conn.), and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.) have all disavowed the measure. But the highest-profile apology has come from Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), who unexpectedly backed away from the law after facing heavy criticism from her more progressive opponent for the Democratic Senate nomination in Minnesota.

“Democrats like Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff — leaders I deeply respect — all came to the same conclusion” to vote for the bill, Craig explained of her vote at the time in a Minnesota Star-Tribune op-ed.

“It is true that the president is not using any laws to carry out these sweeping immigration raids that have terrorized Minnesotans,” she later added, “but it’s also become clear that supporting any bill that gives ICE new authority in this administration was the wrong decision. And I regret my vote.”

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Democrats’ backpedaling illustrates how they are still struggling to formulate a party-wide message on immigration, even as they’ve held the line against further funding for ICE. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, many of them believed the party needed to adopt a tougher line on illegal immigration, but the harsh and eventually deadly tactics deployed by immigration agents in Chicago and Minnesota have turned public opinion on its head. 

The Laken Riley Act, which Congress approved with bipartisan margins, is named after a Georgia student who was killed by an undocumented immigrant in 2024. It lowered the threshold for mandatory detention of migrants from being convicted of a crime to simply being accused of one, including crimes such as theft and burglary, raising due process concerns and allowing for the prolonged detention of innocent people.

Led by the encouragement of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), twelve Senate Democrats joined every Senate Republican in backing the bill the day Trump took office.

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Kelly told HuffPost he didn’t regret his vote for the Laken Riley Act, differentiating between the bill and Trump’s sweeping immigration raids this year that killed two Americans and resulted in the detention and deportation of many immigrants who had no criminal record, contrary to Trump’s promises on the 2024 campaign trail to only go after the most dangerous criminals living in the U.S.

“They’ve been focused on rounding up people who haven’t done anything illegally and are contributing to society in a positive way, and you know, two dead Americans and others who had their rights violated,” Kelly said. “It’s also not what the president said he was going to do.”

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Gallego explained that voters in his state agreed with Trump on going after violent criminals, but that the Trump administration “supercharged” the deportation process this year to target far more people than he promised. Trump won Arizona, a battleground border state, by more than 5 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election. But Gallego won election to the Senate in the same year, outperforming former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and beating GOP candidate Kari Lake.

“The reason I won is because I understood what the voter wanted,” Gallego said. “The voter wanted to make sure that there could be deportations of criminals, especially in very dire circumstances.”

Slotkin, meanwhile, disagreed with the idea raised by critics of the Laken Riley Act that it gave Trump a special green light to launch a sweeping crackdown on immigrants this year. 

“It is clear to me that President Trump sees ICE as his personal law enforcement unit that he can deploy into city streets, into airports, into detention centers, wherever he wants, and I don’t think he was looking for permission from the Congress to do all that. I think that has been part of his plan,” Slotkin said.

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“So I’m just not sure that Donald Trump needs legislated permission to do what he’s doing,” she added.

Craig tried to make a similar case against her primary opponent in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, but it hasn’t seemed to resonate so far. Flanagan outpaces Craig in most polls of the race. 

The Democratic Party is more united on the issue of immigration going into the 2026 midterm elections. Congressional Democrats stood their ground for weeks and refused to provide more funding to ICE, resulting in the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, after Republicans declined to make reforms to the agency, such as a requirement that federal agents wear body cameras and take off their masks when interacting with the public.

House Republicans finally stood down on Wednesday, agreeing to fund all of DHS except ICE, and handing Democrats a win, albeit a tactical one. It’s not clear when, if ever, they’ll get what they really wanted out of the fight: reforms to ICE codified into law. Republicans are planning to fund ICE for three years on their own via a special budget process that won’t require Democratic votes.

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As for the rapidly approaching 2028 presidential campaign, Dempster said Democrats need to be more proactive in their proposals on immigration, rather than telling voters simply which Trump policies they oppose.

“The people who voted for the Laken Riley Act, they need to take extra care to be able to take ownership for what they got wrong,” he said. “But not only that, it’s also an opportunity for anybody running for president to articulate what they’re for. We’ve had a broken immigration system for decades… and anybody running for president not only needs to be able to critique Trump’s anti-immigrant assault, but they also need to provide something proactive. So I would say that it’s both of those things.”

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