The Enduring Power of Copaganda

An unprecedented new immigration detention law and the propaganda behind it

It's important for all people of good will to understand the Laken Riley Act before the Senate’s scheduled cloture vote on it tomorrow morning at 10:00am. It’s unconstitutional. It’s horrific in every word and clause. But there is a deeper, more imminent violence lurking beneath its hate-filled text. I briefly discuss that below, and why none of it would have been possible without some of the most outrageous copaganda that I’ve covered in this newsletter.

First the background. The Laken Riley Act is unprecedented in modern U.S. history. The version that passed the House requires the federal DHS bureaucracy to build billions of dollars in new infrastructure to cage any undocumented person *even accused* of petty theft, shoplifting, or several other property crimes. The mandatory indefinite detention provisions apply to anyone even arrested or charged—something we’ve never seen before.

A key aspect of the law is people are rounded up and put into mass caging facilities (which will be built and usually run for profit) for a mere *accusation.* A person (even a child) need not be convicted, and they are taken from their families and jobs and churches and schools immediately.

Take a look at the monstrous response from “progressive” Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, who is just beginning a six-year term, when asked by local journalists about the shocking requirement that people are detained without any process at all:

It passed the house already, with dozens of Democrats voting for it. As usual, there is a lot of misinformation about what it even does, with even the sponsors repeatedly providing incorrect information to the press and the public about what it actually does and what it costs. The Laken Riley Act goes too far even for the Biden Administration’s ICE bureaucrats, some of the most zealous immigration enforcers in U.S. history. You know something is egregious when even ICE opposes it. ICE is now claiming that the bill requires so much detention that it would need 10,000 more employees and hundreds of thousands of new “beds” in what are essentially new for-profit concentration camps to carry it out. All of this would cost $86 billion for the next three years.

When it was introduced in the Senate, things got even worse. The Senate voted down amendments to protect children and pregnant women from mandatory indefinite detention camps solely for an accusation. Instead, almost 20 Democratic senators joined Republicans in *expanding* the mandatory detention provisions to include even more crimes. One of those crimes is misdemeanor “assault on a police officer,” one of the most poorly understood crimes because of its misnomer. APO is one of the most corrupt corners of the punishment bureaucracy. In many places like DC (where I was a public defender), it has been interpreted to mean just resisting a cop or even sometimes just impeding their performance, and it’s routinely charged by cops to cover up when they beat someone. Now any cop in the U.S. could decide indefinite immigration detention simply by making a false arrest for this misdemeanor whenever they want.

But there is something much deeper to consider. Laws like this are not just about the hundreds of thousands of people who will be detained indefinitely, for months and years, solely because they are accused–but not found guilty–of a minor misdemeanor. And they are not just about the very rich people and companies who will profit from it.

Laws like this will infuse everyday life for tens of millions of people with the threat of imminent violence. How? Because they enable other people to exploit undocumented people and their kids and families. Domestic abusers, employers, bullies at school, cops, etc. Merely *accusing* someone of something now gets them detained indefinitely no matter what:

This threat can be wielded by predators large and small every single moment of every single day. This new power will change so many people's lives. It’s the kind of daily terror, vigilante empowerment, and straight-up chaos that forms the basis of fascist societies and on which the authoritarian project depends.

The threat of imminent personal and familial destruction becomes an even more imminent fact of everyday life. And it affects anyone who knows, cares about, works with, or is related to someone who doesn’t have papers. It not only emboldens predators, it changes all of us.

The bill is the culmination of three catastrophic trends in contemporary copaganda. The reporters and outlets who spread these trends created the climate without which such an unprecedented bill would not be possible.

First, the manufactured “retail theft” panic. The panic about shoplifting has survived, even after it was uncovered as a lie and the retail industry itself admitted it. The Center for Just Journalism has gathered the evidene thoroughly debunking every aspect of it. There simply was no retail theft wave at all. It was entirely a fabrication. And it was a fabrication that took place during historic low property crime rates generally:

Second, the Laken Riley Act is the result of the manufactured panic over bail reform, which I’ve written about extensively. There is a climate-science-like consensus that even short periods of pretrial detention *increases crime* and nonappearance in court in the future (including immigration proceedings) and have catastrophic economic/human costs to society. It makes us *less* safe according to overwhelming evidence. Despite this, media engaged in a years-long panic about “bail reform” that looks a lot like the tobacco industry and fossil fuel industry’s deception. U.S. and Philippines are the only two countries in the world with for-profit bail industry.

But after the lies were exposed and research showed releasing more people saved communities money and reduced crime, the fear and lies left their mark: the Laken Riley Act inexplicably focuses on pre-conviction detention for minor property crime, even at the expense of crimes like murder.

Third, the Laken Riley culmination of Democratic Party and mainstream media’s capitulation to the most nativist, xenophobic, inhuman rhetoric of the far right about immigration. The core of it all is a massive propaganda apparatus to generate fear and to obscure the core driving principle of borders and immigration laws in a world of extreme, intentional inequality and colonial extraction: the notion that human beings are worth more or less depending on where they are born.

Finally, all of this is unconstitutional under many decades of precedent. Because bodily liberty is a “fundamental” constitutional right, government cannot deprive it without an individualized determination that it is necessary to serve a compelling government interest.

Numerous state and federal courts have overturned attempts at blanket forms of pre-adjudication detention, and even in the immigration context courts have rejected indefinite detention with no process and no ability for individualized findings.

And yet, a small group of private prison officials, surveillance companies, and lots of government bureaucrats are about to make billions of dollars and create permanent new jobs and bureaucracies that will be impossible later to dismantle. All in service of misinformed hate.

This could be a moment for leaders to expose hate, misinformation, mean-spirited bullying, and division in service of a passionate and evidence-based articulation of shared prosperity and human flourishing.

The fact that prominent Democrats are joining in the depraved, uninformed, and ignorant chorus to pass this law should be a warning to people of good will. We are becoming an even meaner, more misguided society. Fascists become stronger with every act of appeasement, and every public statement that reifies the even celebrates their worldview. There's time to shift course, and to stand up for fellow humans.

UPDATE 12:00pm 1/17/25: A number of Democrats caved and voted for cloture on the Act, permitting it to avoid a filibuster, and it will likely now become law in its even more extreme and expanded version relative to the House bill.