Smuggling someone who is not a U.S. citizen for benefit or to conceal them from law enforcement would become a criminal offense in Iowa under a bill that advanced in the Iowa House Wednesday.
The Republican push for said legislation comes just days after President Donald Trump entered his second term and signed a flurry of executive actions impacting immigration on his first day of office.
Among the slew of nearly 100 executive orders were orders to seal the nation’s borders, a systematic crackdown on undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S., and a bid to cut off birthright citizenship for the children of noncitizens. Attorneys general from 22 states sued Trump as of Tuesday to block the bid.
Trump also declared a state of national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, allowing for the deployment of the military and the National Guard.
Iowa Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison, introduced a similar bill last legislative session, and it died in the Iowa Senate. Holt introduced House Study Bill 15, which was advanced out of subcommittee by lawmakers in a 2-1 vote Wednesday afternoon.
Holt and Rep. Skyler Wheeler, R-Hull, voted in favor; Rep. Lindsay James, D-Dubuque, was opposed. The bill will now be sent to the full House Judiciary Committee.
“States have got to start defending themselves, because thank God we now have a new president in the White House, but we had an administration for four years that did nothing on the southern border, allowed an invasion, which impacted our citizens in a profound way,” Holt said Wednesday.
Holt said Iowa is welcoming for legal immigrants, and he does not intend for the state to be welcoming to “violators of the law and to illegal aliens.”
Iowa Rep. Lindsay James, D-Dubuque, a Presbyterian pastor, said she’s worried about the legislation criminalizing religious communities that support immigrants.
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“I worry about this particular piece of legislation criminalizing religious communities and the unintended consequences of folks living out their faith commitments and unintentionally committing crimes,” James said.
James said she is concerned about the redundancy of enforcing such legislation in Iowa when it is a priority for the Trump administration, and the federal government should be the entity to take on immigration law and policy.
Wheeler said he “completely and totally” disagrees “with any attempt to try and use scripture to say that the United States of America’s job is to open its borders to anybody and everybody.”
He said illegal immigration has been a huge burden to Iowa, pointing to a strain on the education and health care system, and law enforcement.
“I don’t think that this bill is even really getting at the heart of the issue,” Wheeler said. “I think President Trump is probably going to get to that. But I think as a state, we have to take action, especially if we’re in a situation like we were the last four years in the future, where we have an administration deliberately flooding the country with massive amounts of illegal aliens. So I am more than happy to move this forward.”