2025 Crime & Immigration Bills.

HB 183 Noncitizen Restricted Person Amendments provides that non-citizens with applications pending for asylum or temporary protected status are restricted persons not allowed to possess, purchase, transfer, or own dangerous weapons. Since non-citizens are already restricted, we did not oppose this bill.

HB 226 Criminal Amendments was another high priority oppose bill. The original version of this bill was much worse, seeking to raise the incarceration term for all class A misdemeanors from 364 days to 365 days. This seemingly minor change would trigger expedited deportation for non-citizen offenders, in many cases removing their right to see an immigration judge. As we pointed out to the committee and sponsor, this would ONLY impact non-citizens that are here in the U.S. lawfully, since those here unlawfully are already subject to immediate deportation. The original version also sought to allow the dissolution of a nonprofit convicted of allowing the landing of aliens or human smuggling. After countless hours working on this with other defense-minded stakeholders, the final bill was narrowed to remove the provision on nonprofits and limit the sentencing enhancement to DUIs and offenses against another person. The bill still creates a rebuttable presumption at pretrial that someone is at risk of fleeing if they are in the U.S. unlawfully or if they have been charged with an offense that could revoke their lawful presence status and requires a sheriff to notify a relevant federal immigration authority when releasing a felony or class A misdemeanor offender who is in the U.S. unlawfully. We believe this bill and others like it this session are based on the false narrative that non-citizens offend at a higher rate than citizens, when the opposite is true.

HB 278 Massage Therapy Amendments expands the class A misdemeanor offense for unlawful conduct of a massage therapist to include a range of offenses, such as operating without a license or concealing someone in the massage establishment and refusing to provide identification to law enforcement.

SB 90 Mandatory Jail Sentence Amendments is another “crimmigration” bill that started out much worse and more far-reaching. The original bill created an enhancement of one degree for a crime committed by an individual in the U.S. unlawfully, with additional fines and indeterminate prison terms. We worked with the sponsors to narrow the enhancement to cases in which someone is deported and re-enters the country illegally and then commits a new crime. This bill does include a mandatory jail sentence for drug- and theft-related crimes committed on re-entry, prohibiting the offender from being turned over to the federal government for deportation until the person has served the entire mandatory jail sentence. When asked why the state would codify policy to house non-citizens on taxpayer dollars, the sponsors explained that they wanted to target people likely involved with the cartel who would have the resources to re-enter the US with ease to commit more drug offenses. Because we were able to get the bill much more narrow, we did not publicly oppose it.